Ross Macdonald

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This article is about Ross Macdonald, the author. For the Canadian sailor see Ross MacDonald.

Ross Macdonald is the pseudonym of American-Canadian writer of mystery fiction and detective fiction Kenneth Millar (December 13, 1915 Los Gatos, California - July 11, 1983 Santa Barbara, California).

Millar was raised in his parents' native Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. There he met and married Margaret Sturm in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970. He began his career writing stories for pulp magazines. While doing graduate study at the University of Michigan, he completed his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, in 1944. At this time, he wrote under the name John Macdonald, in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar. He then changed briefly to John Ross Macdonald before settling on Ross Macdonald, in order to avoid mixups with contemporary John D. MacDonald. After serving at sea as a naval communications officer from 1944-46, he returned to Michigan, where he obtained his PhD degree in 1951.

Macdonald first introduced the popular detective Lew Archer, the tough but humane private eye who would inhabit some twenty of his novels, in The Moving Target in 1949. This novel would become the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film, Harper.[1] In the early 1950s, he returned to California, settling for some thirty years in Santa Barbara, the area where most of his books were set. (Macdonald's fictional name for Santa Barbara was Santa Teresa; this "pseudonym" for the town was subsequently resurrected by Sue Grafton, whose "alphabet novels" are also set in Santa Teresa.) The very successful Lew Archer series, including bestsellers The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty, concluded with The Blue Hammer in 1976. Lew Archer derives his name from Sam Spade's partner Miles Archer, and from Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.

Macdonald is the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American "hard boiled" mysteries. His writing built on the pithy style of his predecessors by adding psychological depth and insights into the motivations of his characters. Macdonald's plots were complicated, and often turned on Archer's unearthing family secrets of his clients and of the criminals who victimized them. Lost or wayward sons and daughters were a theme common to many of the novels. Macdonald deftly combined the two sides of the mystery genre, the "whodunit" and the psychological thriller. Even his regular readers seldom saw a Macdonald denouement coming.

Macdonald's writing was hailed by genre fans and literary critics alike. Author William Goldman called his works "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American author".

Contents

[edit] Novels

Lew Archer Novels

Lew Archer Short Stories

  • The Name is Archer (paperback original containing 7 stories) - 1955
  • Lew Archer: Private Investigator (The Name is Archer + 2 additional stories) - 1977

Lew Archer Omnibuses

  • Archer in Hollywood - 1967
  • Archer at Large - 1970
  • Archer in Jeopardy - 1979

Other Novels
--writing as Kenneth Millar

--writing as Ross Macdonald

  • Meet Me at the Morgue (aka Experience With Evil) - 1953
  • The Ferguson Affair - 1960

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ According to Tom Nolan's biography of Macdonald, Newman got Archer's name changed because his previous two hit movies, Hud and The Hustler, had started with "H".

[edit] References

Bruccoli, Matthew J. Ross Macdonald. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. ISBN 0-15-179009-4 | ISBN 0-15-679082-3

Nolan, Tom. Ross Macdonald: A Biography. New York: Scribner, 1999. ISBN 0-684-81217-7

[edit] External links

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