My inspirations were books that were driven not by plot or character or forensic verisimilitude, but by those that towered above the rest because of the strength and suitability of their style. Apocalyptic prose, I call it--words fit for the edges of experience, which is where these books take place."
While Millar is considered--and considered himself--to be a disciple of Hammett and Chandler, ultimately he may have become a better novelist than either of his predecessors. In his 1 June 1969 review of Millar's The Goodbye Look (1969) in The New York Times Book Review, William Goldman called the Lew Archer books "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American." John Leonard, editor of The New York Times Book Review, interviewed Millar for the same issue and wrote an accompanying article in which he declared: "Ten years ago, while nobody was looking--or rather, while everybody was looking in the wrong direction--a writer of detective stories turned into a major American novelist."
For his own part, Millar claimed he was bringing the detective novel "closer to the purpose and range of the mainstream novel." Nolan argues that the Archer novels rise above the hard-boiled genre because Millar used them to explore his own psyche: "In his novels, Millar resolved his contradictions: there he hid and revealed an aching loneliness, a melancholy humor, and a lifetime of anger, fear, and regret.
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