Ross Macdonald’s Followers (668)

Ross Macdonald

Born

in Los Gatos, California, The United States

December 13, 1915

Died

July 11, 1983

Genre

Mystery & Thrillers

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Ross Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar. He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer.

Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his parents' native Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. When his father abandoned his family unexpectedly, Macdonald lived with his mother and various relatives, moving several times by his sixteenth year. The prominence of broken homes and domestic problems in his fiction has its roots in his youth.

In Canada, he met and married Margaret Sturm (Margaret Millar)in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970.

He began his career writing stories fo Ross Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar. He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer.

Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his parents' native Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. When his father abandoned his family unexpectedly, Macdonald lived with his mother and various relatives, moving several times by his sixteenth year. The prominence of broken homes and domestic problems in his fiction has its roots in his youth.

In Canada, he met and married Margaret Sturm (Margaret Millar)in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970.

He began his career writing stories for pulp magazines. Millar attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Ph.D. in literature. While doing graduate study, 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 to 1946, he returned to Michigan, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree.

Macdonald's popular detective 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 first introduced the tough but humane private eye in the 1946 short story Find the Woman. A full-length novel, The Moving Target, followed in 1949. This novel (the first in a series of eighteen) would become the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film Harper. 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. The very successful Lew Archer series, including bestsellers The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty, concluded with The Blue Hammer in 1976.

Macdonald died of Alzheimer's disease in Santa Barbara, California.

Macdonald is the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled 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. ...more

Combine Editions
Ross Macdonald’s books

Average rating: 3.97 · 50,026 ratings · 4,669 reviews · 140 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Drowning Pool (Lew Archer, #2) 3.94 avg rating — 6,848 ratings — published 1950 — 64 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Chill (Lew Archer, #11) 4.09 avg rating — 3,905 ratings — published 1964 — 65 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Moving Target (Lew Archer, #1) 3.81 avg rating — 3,998 ratings — published 1949 — 64 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Galton Case (Lew Archer, #8) 4.08 avg rating — 3,462 ratings — published 1959 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Way Some People Die (Lew Archer, #3) 4.03 avg rating — 2,673 ratings — published 1951 — 35 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Ivory Grin (Lew Archer, #4) 3.98 avg rating — 2,308 ratings — published 1952 — 53 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Zebra-Striped Hearse (Lew Archer, #10) 4.09 avg rating — 2,186 ratings — published 1962 — 51 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Black Money (Lew Archer, #13) 3.96 avg rating — 2,111 ratings — published 1966 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Underground Man (Lew Archer, #16) 3.94 avg rating — 2,022 ratings — published 1971 — 59 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Blue Hammer (Lew Archer, #18) 4.01 avg rating — 1,970 ratings — published 1976 — 61 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by Ross Macdonald…

Series by Ross Macdonald

Lew Archer (38 books)
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3.98 avg rating — 43,941 ratings

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Quotes by Ross Macdonald (?)

“The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.”
― Ross McDonald

tags: books, introversion, literature, reading, words

86 likes

“There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Drowning Pool

67 likes

“Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.”
― Ross MacDonald

29 likes

See all Ross Macdonald's quotes »

Polls

February 2023 Group Read: Vintage

Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village by Maureen Johnson

56 votes, 31.8%

Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin

26 votes, 14.8%

The Ice House by Minette Walters

21 votes, 11.9%

Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon

20 votes, 11.4%

The Chill by Ross Macdonald

14 votes, 8.0%

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

12 votes, 6.8%

Only One Lie by Audrey J. Cole

7 votes, 4.0%

Design for Dying by Renee Patrick

6 votes, 3.4%

Five Decembers by James Kestrel

5 votes, 2.8%

Red Dirt Blues by David K. Wilson

5 votes, 2.8%

Landscape of Lies by Peter Watson

4 votes, 2.3%

176 total votes

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Ross Macdonald’s Followers (668)

Ross Macdonald

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