Ross Macdonald Popular Books
Ross Macdonald Biography & Facts
Ross Macdonald was the main pseudonym used by the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar (; December 13, 1915 – July 11, 1983). He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in Southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer. Since the 1970s, Macdonald's works (particularly the Archer novels) have received attention in academic circles for their psychological depth, sense of place, use of language, sophisticated imagery and integration of philosophy into genre fiction. Brought up in the province of Ontario, Canada, Macdonald eventually settled in the state of California, where he died in 1983. The Wall Street Journal wrote that:"... it is the sheer beauty of Macdonald’s laconic style—with its seductive rhythms and elegant plainness—that holds us spellbound. 'Hard-boiled,' 'noir,' 'mystery,' it doesn’t matter what you call it. Macdonald, with insolent grace, blows past the barrier constructed by Dorothy Sayers between 'the literature of escape' and 'the literature of expression.' These novels, triumphs of his literary alchemy, dare to be both." Life Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his Canadian parents' native Kitchener, Ontario. Millar was a Scots spelling of the surname Miller, and the author pronounced his name Miller rather than Millar. When his father abandoned the family unexpectedly when Millar was four years old, he and his mother lived with various relatives, and he had moved several times by his 16th year. Back in Canada as a young adult, he returned to Kitchener, where he studied, and subsequently graduated from the University of Western Ontario with an Honors degree in History and English. He found work as a high school teacher. Some years later, he attended the University of Michigan and received a PhD in 1952. He married Margaret Sturm in 1938, though they'd known each other earlier in high school. They had a daughter in 1939, Linda, who died in 1970. The family moved from Kitchener to Santa Barbara in 1946.Millar began his career writing stories for pulp magazines and used his real name for his first four novels. Of these he completed the first, The Dark Tunnel, in 1944. After serving at sea as a naval communications officer from 1944 to 1946, Millar returned to Michigan, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in literature. For his doctorate, Millar studied under poet W.H. Auden, who (unusually for a prominent literary intellectual of the era) held mystery or detective fiction could rise to the level of literature and encouraged Millar's interest in the genre.For his fifth novel, in 1949, he wrote under the name John Macdonald (his father's first and middle names) in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar. He then changed his pen name briefly to John Ross Macdonald, before settling on Ross Macdonald (Ross borrowed from a favorite cousin) in order to avoid being confused with fellow mystery writer John D. MacDonald, who was writing under his real name. Millar would use the pseudonym "Ross Macdonald" on all his fiction from the mid '50s forward.Most of his books were set primarily in and around his adopted hometown of Santa Barbara. In these works, the city where Lew Archer is based goes under the fictional name of Santa Teresa. In 1983 Macdonald died of Alzheimer's disease. Work Macdonald first introduced the tough but humane private eye Lew Archer in the 1946 short story "Find the Woman" (credited then to "Ken Millar"). A novel featuring him, The Moving Target, (1949) was the first in a series of eighteen. Macdonald mentions in the foreword to the Archer in Hollywood omnibus that his detective derives his name from Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, and from Lewis Wallace, author of Ben-Hur, though the character was patterned on Philip Marlowe. Macdonald also said the surname "Archer" was inspired by his own astrological sign of Sagittarius the archer.The novels were hailed by genre fans and literary critics alike. He has been called the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries.Macdonald's writing built on the pithy style of his predecessors by adding psychological depth and insights into the motivations of his characters. His plots, described as of "baroque splendor", were complicated and often turned on Archer's unearthing family secrets of upwardly mobile clients, sometimes going back over several generations. Lost or wayward sons and daughters were a theme common to many of the novels. Critics have commented favorably on Macdonald's deft combination of the two sides of the mystery genre, the "whodunit" and the psychological thriller. Even his regular readers seldom saw a Macdonald denouement coming. Tom Nolan, Macdonald's biographer, wrote, "By any standard he was remarkable. His first books, patterned on Hammett and Chandler, were at once vivid chronicles of a postwar California and elaborate retellings of Greek and other classic myths. Gradually he swapped the hard-boiled trappings for more subjective themes: personal identity, the family secret, the family scapegoat, the childhood trauma; how men and women need and battle each other, how the buried past rises like a skeleton to confront the present. He brought the tragic drama of Freud and the psychology of Sophocles to detective stories, and his prose flashed with poetic imagery." Recognition The Lew Archer novels are recognized as some of the most significant American mystery books of the mid 20th century, bringing a literary sophistication to the genre. The critic John Leonard declared that Macdonald had surpassed the limits of crime fiction to become "a major American novelist". William Goldman, who adapted Macdonald's The Moving Target to film as Harper in 1966, called his works "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American". A later film adaptation was The Drowning Pool (1975), also starring Paul Newman as the detective "Lew Harper". In addition, The Underground Man was adapted as a TV movie in 1974.Over his career, Macdonald was presented with several awards. In 1964, the Mystery Writers of America awarded him the Silver Dagger award for The Chill. Ten years later, he received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and in 1982 he received "The Eye," the Lifetime Achievement Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. In 1982, he was awarded the Robert Kirsch Award by the Los Angeles Times for "an outstanding body of work by an author from the West or featuring the West." Bibliography Writing as Kenneth Millar The Dark Tunnel (a.k.a. I Die Slowly) – 1944 Trouble Follows Me (a.k.a. Night Train) – 1946 Blue City – 1947 (filmed with Judd Nelson as Blue City, 1986) The Three Roads – 1948 (filmed with Michael Sarrazin as Deadly Companion, 1980)These first four novels, all non-series standalones, were initially published using Millar's real name, but hav.... Discover the Ross Macdonald popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Ross Macdonald books.
Best Seller Ross Macdonald Books of 2024
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The Wycherly Woman
Ross MacDonaldPhoebe Wycherly was missing two months before her wealthy father hired Archer to find her. That was plenty of time for a young girl who wanted to disappear to do so thoroughlyor fo...
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The Underground Man
Ross MacDonaldAs a mysterious fire rages through the hills above a privileged town in Southern California, Archer tracks a missing child who may be the pawn in a marital struggle or th...
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The Archer Files
Ross MacDonald & Tom NolanNo matter what cases private eye Lew Archer takes ona burglary, a runaway, or a disappeared personthe trail always leads to tangled family secrets and murder. Widely considered the...
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The Way Some People Die
Ross MacDonaldIn a rundown house in Santa Monica, Mrs. Samuel Lawrence presses fifty crumpled bills into Lew Archer's hand and asks him to find her wandering daughter, Galatea. Described as ‘cra...
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The Blue Hammer
Ross MacDonaldThe desert air is hot with sex and betrayal, death and madness and only Detective Lew Archer can make sense of a killer who makes murder a work of art.Finding a purloined portrait...
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Gonzo Wall Street
Richard E. FarleyA Simon & Schuster eBook. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every reader.
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The Doomsters
Ross MacDonaldHired by Carl Hallman, the desperateeyed junkie scion of an obscenely wealthy political dynasty, detective Lew Archer investigates the suspicious deaths of his parents, Senator Hal...
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The Franchise Affair
Josephine Tey'The new crime and espionage series from Penguin Classics makes for a mouthwatering prospect' Daily TelegraphAbducted, beaten, hidden in an attic, a young woman stages an audacious...
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SoHo Sins
Richard VinePortrait in BLOODThey were the New York art scene’s golden couple until the day Amanda Oliver was found murdered in her SoHo loft, and her husband Philip confessed to shooting her...
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Blue City
Ross MacDonaldHe was a son who hadn’t known his father very well. It was a town shaken by a grisly murderhis father’s murder. Johnny Weatherly was home from a war and wandering. ...
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The Great Portrait Mystery
R. Austin FreemanThe National Portrait Gallery is the opening setting for this delightful mystery of theft and fraud. A painter copies diligently from a watercolour one morning when an enigmatic mu...
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The Goodbye Look
Ross MacDonaldIn The Goodbye Look, Lew Archer is hired to investigate a burglary at the missionstyle mansion of Irene and Larry Chalmers. The prime suspect, their son Nick, has a talent for disa...
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Meet Me at the Morgue
Ross MacDonaldSomebody in Pacific Point is guilty of a kidnapping, but what probation officer Howard Cross wants to find most is innocence: in an exwar hero who has taken a tough manslaughter ra...
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The Far Side of the Dollar
Ross MacDonaldIn The Far Side of the Dollar, private investigator Lew Archer is looking for an unstable rich kid who has run away from an exclusive reform schooland into the arms of kidnappers. ...
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Black Money
Ross MacDonaldWhen Lew Archer is hired to get the goods on the suspiciously suave Frenchman who's run off with his client's girlfriend, it looks like a simple case of alienated affections. Thing...
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The Drowning Pool
Ross MacDonaldWhen a millionaire matriarch is found floating face down in the family pool, the prime suspects are her goodfornothing son and his seductive teenage daughter. In The Drowning Pool,...
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The Three Roads
Ross MacDonaldSilken skin pale against dark hair, red lips provocatively smiling at himthat’s how Lieutenant Bret Taylor remembered Lorraine. He was drunk when he married her, stone cold s...
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Sleeping Beauty
Ross MacDonaldIn Sleeping Beauty, Lew Archer finds himself the confidant of a wealthy, violent family with a load of trouble on their handsincluding an oil spill, a missing girl, a lethal dose o...
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The Last Stand
Mickey SpillaneON MICKEY SPILLANE'S 100TH BIRTHDAY A BRANDNEW NOVEL FROM THE MASTERWhen legendary mystery writer Mickey Spillane died in 2006, he left behind the manuscript of one last novel he'...
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The Instant Enemy
Ross MacDonaldGenerations of murder, greed and deception come home to roost in time for the most shocking conclusion ever in a Lew Archer novel. At first glance, it's an openandshut missi...
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The Zebra-Striped Hearse
Ross MacDonaldStrictly speaking, Lew Archer is only supposed to dig up the dirt on a rich man's suspicious soontobe soninlaw. But in no time at all Archer is following a trail of corpses from th...
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The Galton Case
Ross MacDonaldLew Archer returns in this gripping mystery, widely recognized as one of acclaimed mystery writer Ross Macdonald's very best, about the search for the long lost heir of the we...
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The Barbarous Coast
Ross MacDonaldThe beautiful, highdiving blonde had Hollywood dreams and stars in her eyes but now she seems to have disappeared without a trace. Hired by her hotheaded husband and her rummy “unc...
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Ross MacDonald
Tom NolanWhen he died in 1983, Ross Macdonald was the bestknown and most highly regarded crimefiction writer in America. Long considered the rightful successor to the mantles of Dashiell Ha...
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The Ross Macdonald Collection
Ross MacDonaldRoss Macdonald transformed the detective novel into a literary expression of unique psychological depth and drama. Contains: Four Novels of the 1950s (Library of America volume #26...
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The Bearded Lady
Ross MacDonaldIn this short story from Ross Macdonald’s The Archer Files, detective Lew Archer stops in town to look in on an old army buddy, an artist, only to find that he has mysteriously dis...
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The Ivory Grin
Ross MacDonaldTraveling from sleazy motels to stately seaside manors, The Ivory Grin is one of Lew Archer's most violent and macabre cases ever.A hardfaced woman clad in a blue mink stole and dr...
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The Ferguson Affair
Ross MacDonaldIt was a long way from the milliondollar Foothill Club to Pelly Street, where grudges were settled in blood and Spanish and a stolen diamond ring landed a girl in jail. Defen...
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The Chill
Ross MacDonaldIn The Chill a distraught young man hires private investigator Lew Archer to track down his runaway bride. But no sooner has he found Dolly Kincaid than Archer finds himself entang...
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Find a Victim
Ross MacDonaldLas Cruces wasn’t a place most travelers would think to stop. But after private investigator Lew Archer plays the good samaritan and picks up a bloodied hitchhiker, he finds himse...
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Meanwhile There Are Letters
Suzanne Marrs & Tom Nolan2016 Edgar Award Finalist2016 Anthony Award Finalist2016 Macavity Award FinalistIn 1970, Ross Macdonald wrote a letter to Eudora Welty, beginning a thirteenyear correspondence betw...
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The Moving Target
Ross MacDonaldThe first book in Ross Macdonald's acclaimed Lew Archer series introduces the detective who redefined the role of the American private eye and gave the crime novel a psychological ...