Part of the fun of mystery novels is trying to work out puzzles, and I quite enjoyed chewing over a puzzle presented by this one: why do I dislike this so much?

There was an obvious answer: the protagonist and his portrayal. Our narrator, Casper Laing, is a loathsome sex pest, an irresponsible drunk, and a heedless narcissist. Now, you can’t write a character quite so flawed without noticing that you’re doing so, but Davidson apparently thinks that his creation is, overall, a good egg. At the crucial moments, Laing dashingly displays all the heroic virtues, and earns absolution for all his vices, none of which turn out to be too consequential anyway. The object of his affections (most often referred to as “the girl”) turns out to consider relentless badgering the very best of foreplay; his drinking results in nothing much more than chucklesome antics; and the headlong charges after his own interests deliver outrageous success more often than not. There is much to dislike here, but after some thought I concluded that this was a red herring. Too obvious. The answer had to be deeper.

Was it, perhaps, the plot? The plot is unarguably preposterous, a caper across the plains and deserts of Israel in search of McGuffins. Laing is a brilliant young professor of archaeology, or philology, or some such thing involving very old Middle Eastern languages (don’t worry, though—we’re assured early on that he’s the sexy “intuitive” kind of brainy, not the frumpy thinking-hard-about-stuff kind). He’s hired by people vaguely connected with the Israeli establishment, at first to find and interpret an ancient scroll, and subsequently to find and recover the treasure whose location the scroll reveals, all before the Bad Guys get there first. Escapades and shenanigans ensue: scrapes, escapes, fights, heights, chases, even a courtroom scene. It’s all deeply, deeply silly, a succession of set pieces tenuously connected. But dislikeable? Surely not. Who doesn’t like a silly pseudo-archaeological adventure, done well? (it’s easy to believe that George Lucas absorbed quite a lot from this book that later shaped Indiana Jones)

But wait: that’s it. Done well! Or, in this case, not. Here’s the thing: to successfully pull off this kind of caper, you need to dissuade the audience from thinking too closely about what’s going on. The writing needs to be fluent, pacey, and smooth: it needs to speed the reader along, not trip them up. And for far too much of this book, the reader is stumbling around. Furthermore, this is due to clearly deliberate style choices. It’s as if Davidson has taken far too much heed of two bits of common writing advice. First: “show, don’t tell”. Yes, fine, avoid clunky exposition, but not at the cost of leaving your descriptions so vague and oblique that the reader frequently has to pause to work out what the hell is actually being described. Second: “avoid cliché like the plague”. Again, fine, but if the alternative is convoluted syntax, dangling pronouns, pile-ups of adverbs and modifiers, and the occasional gobstopping thesaurus word (“inpissated”, anyone?) . . . well, you might be better off just laying out some boilerplate now and again. The whole thing reminded me somewhat obscurely of Beckett, and that would be a compliment if the work were one where a tricksy style ought to be to the focus, but in this case it’s definitely not a compliment.

I’ve analysed all this as if the problem is that Davidson is trying to be A Writer, rather than just writing. The other slightly worrying possibility is that he thinks he has faithfully recreated how brainy people actually speak and think. Whatever the cause, it’s all a bit of a shame, because when he forgets being A Writer and just writes, he can put a tense, gripping scene on the page, and he can manage evocative description of locale. I can see why a lot of people like this. But I didn’t much.

This was the first Gold Dagger winner from anywhere but the UK, which struck me as so odd that I wrote to ask the CWA whether there was a nationality restriction prior to 1965. To my great delight, they actually wrote back. They said no.

A further oddity: I think this was the first winner to feature a well-established lead character (the previous winner introduced a character who went on to become established). The book is MacDonald's 12th of 18 featuring Lew Archer. I've read a couple of the others. In the early books, Archer is a fairly derivative Marlowe-style LA private eye in the Marlowe style. By this one, he has his own character and MacDonald his own style, out of Chandler's shadow.

Both character and style are, in a sense, minimal. Where Chandler's Marlowe is (for example) somewhat unsubtly erudite, Archer leaves the poetry stuff to other characters (mind you, MacDonald had a PhD in literature gained under the supervision of WH Auden, no less).. Where Chandler through Marlowe is given to some extravagant metaphorical flourishes, MacDonald through Archer employs only the most plain similes. There is a clear lineage, but also clear differentiation.

That said, this book offers a fairly Chandleresque proposition. A missing scion of a well-to-do family, a PI on the hunt, both scion and family gradually revealed to be harbouring secrets that can't go unrevealed if the case is to be solved. There is seedy LA underworld, there is a dame of sorts, there is a faint Hollywood connection—all the scenic elements you'd hope for.

The plot unravelled against that scenic backdrop is sufficiently gripping that you can overlook the fact that the middle third is essentially a sort of picaresque quest as Archer methodically follows lead A to find clue B from which to deduce fact C which provides lead D ... and so on. After all that, the parts are in place, and are gradually pulled together in a satisfyingly tight configuration, with just one piece held back to provide some last-page closure.

There is, arguably, more psychological depth and insight here than in Chandler; this is often said to be a way in which MacDonald managed to exceed as well as succeed his model. Mind, I do think that MacDonald's wife, Margaret Millar, is greater still at precisely showing human minds in all their particular peculiarities. MacDonald, incidentally, agreed that Millar was the better writer, and accordingly ceded to her the use of their real married name.

I am, frankly, a sucker for this kind of mid-century American detective fiction. It's not at all cosy—that's part of why I like it—but it feels somehow like sinking into something supremely comfortable, at least when it's done well. Perhaps it's partly the fact that, compared with the UK stuff I've read recently in this series, it's pleasingly, smoothly even in mood. There's none of the jarring shifts between whimsy and brutality you get in Keating, or Davidson, or the like. Humour is confined to occasional sardonic commentary, and otherwise you feel that Archer and his ilk will forever be cruising in unseasonal drizzle round the unglamorous fringes of glamourtown. I could happily drive around with them for eternity, too.