Kenneth Millar, who wrote as Ross Macdonald, was the successor to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in the development of the hard-boiled detective story into serious literature. Millar wrote two dozen novels between 1944 and 1976, eighteen of them...

Kenneth Millar, who has written under the pseudonyms John Macdonald, John Ross Macdonald, and Ross Macdonald, was born in Los Gatos, California, on 13 December 1915, but was raised in Ontario, Canada. When Millar was three years old, his father...

AT THE TIME OF Ross Macdonald's death 20 years ago, critics and readers alike considered him the greatest American crime novelist since Raymond Chandler. Like Chandler, Macdonald was praised as a literary artist, not just a detective story writer. The New York Times once...

Tom Nolan. Scribner, $32 (496p) ISBN 0-684-81217-7 All aficionados of the mystery genre know the work of Ross Macdonald (the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar), whom Nolan calls the "philosopher king of detective novelists," the author of 18 Lew Archer novels and heir...

Back when summer actually meant a few months of relaxing and down time to New Yorkers, one of the most treasured rituals was the weekly trip to the neighborhood bookstore, to choose a new book (or stack of books) to keep one company at the...

Back when summer actually meant a few months of relaxing and down time to New Yorkers, one of the most treasured rituals was the weekly trip to the neighborhood bookstore, to choose a new book (or stack of books) to keep one company at the...

[Ross Macdonald's] novels are well-built, suspenseful, and easy both to read and enjoy. His best work gives equal weight to invention and execution. His intellectual power, social conscience, and bright, crisp style promote both impact and resonance. He has something to say, knows how to say it, and deserves to be heard. (p. 1) A good example of his ability to write books that everybody can read inheres in his treatment of sex. He never denies the force of sex; sex always plays a large part in the tr...

Until now I had never read a Ross Macdonald novel. My loss. For on the basis of The Blue Hammer alone—and there are 19 earlier Macdonald novels in the Lew Archer canon—this writer of cracking detective stories is as good as the more relentlessly "serious" American novelists of the declining years of our 20th century, and better than most. A snap judgment, perhaps, but that's what we're paid for. And a shameful admission. For Ross Macdonald is as easy to read as he i...

In Ross Macdonald's novels, the past is always falling in on top of the present. Lew Archer, a wise, tired, divorced and lonely private eye, is hired to investigate a theft or a kidnapping or the disappearance of a child, and immediately, as if released by Archer's appearance on the scene, murky old cats begin to leap out of poorly sealed bags. Archer uncovers guilt wherever he goes, and his job, once the cats are all out and howling, is to put them together into a theory, to tie the past to t...