Ross Macdonald

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

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Ross Macdonald is the pseudonym of American-Canadian writer of mystery fiction and detective fiction Kenneth Millar (December 13, 1915 - July 11, 1983). Born in Los Gatos, California, in the San Francisco Bay area, in 1915, Millar was raised in his parents' native Canada, where he started college. There he met and married the former Margaret Sturm in 1938. 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 Storm, 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.

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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. (Why the character's name was changed is unclear.) 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 Barbara.) 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 '.

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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. Even his regular readers seldom saw a Macdonald denouement coming.

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Macdonald's writing was hailed by genre fans and literary critics alike. Author William Golding called his works "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American author". He died in Santa Barbara in 1983.

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Mystery fiction: Mystery fiction is a distinct subgenre of detective fiction that entails the occurrence of an unknown event which requires the protagonist to make known (or solve). It is similar to the whodunit in that the clues may often be given to the reader by subtle means. Though it is often confused with de...

Detective fiction: Detective fiction is a branch of crime fiction that centres upon the investigation of a crime, usually murder, by a detective, either professional or amateur. It is closely related to mystery fiction but generally contains more of a puzzle element that must be solved, generally by a single protagon...

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Ross Macdonald related Images and Photos (experimental)

Macdonald Carey	Rick Ross: Trilla	Rick Ross: Trilla	Jeanette MacDonald
Jeanette MacDonald	Diana Ross	Aaron Ross	Diana Ross
Aaron Ross	Diana Ross	Diana Ross	Jeanette MacDonald Print