In The MacGuffin, Elkin narrates with accustomed panache the mysterious events that take place in something under forty hours in the life of Bobby Druff, City Commissioner of Streets, aged fifty-eight, whose ordered world of avenues and roads seems suddenly a rather more complicated maze than he remembers. Events, in fact, conspire against him, and his wife, his son, his new-found lover, even his chauffeur, appear to be in on it. The novel combines a sort of tough-talking, laugh-out-loud humor and that odd, amusing, under-the-breath revenge of the powerless with the twists and killer thrill rides of a plot to rival Hitchcock's.