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Affiliates
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Works by
Ross MacDonald
(Aka Kenneth Millar)
(Writer)
[1915 - 1983]
Note: Ross MacDonald was the
husband of mystery writer
Margaret Millar
Profile created
June 5, 2005
Updated August 27, 2009
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Lew Archer Series
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The Moving Target
(1949, 1998)
Like many Southern California millionaires,
Ralph Sampson keeps odd company. There's the sun-worshipping holy man
whom Sampson once gave his very own mountain; the fading actress with
sidelines in astrology and S&M. Now one of Sampson's friends may have
arranged his kidnapping.
As Lew Archer follows the clues from the canyon sanctuaries of the
megarich to jazz joints where you get beaten up between sets, The
Moving Target blends sex, greed, and family hatred into an explosively
readable crime novel.
Republished as
Harper
(1966)
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The Drowning Pool
(1951, 1996)
When a millionaire matriarch is found floating face-down in the family
pool, the prime suspects are her good-for-nothing son and his
seductive teenage daughter. In The Drowning Pool, Lew Archer
takes this case in the L.A. suburbs and encounters a moral wasteland
of corporate greed and family hatred--and sufficient motive for a
dozen murders.
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The Way Some People Die
(1951, 2007)
In a rundown house in Santa Monica, Mrs.
Samuel Lawrence presses fifty crumpled bills into Lew Archer's hand
and asks him to find her wandering daughter, Galatea. Described as
‘crazy for men’ and without discrimination, she was last seen driving
off with small-time gangster Joe Tarantine, a hophead hood with a rep
for violence. Archer traces the hidden trail from San Francisco slum
alleys to the luxury of Palm Springs, traveling through an urban
wilderness of drugs and viciousness. As the bodies begin to pile up,
he finds that even angel faces can mask the blackest of hearts.
Filled with dope, delinquents and murder, this is classic Macdonald
and one of his very best in the Lew Archer series.
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The Ivory Grin
(1952, 2007)
A hard-faced woman clad
in a blue mink stole and dripping with diamonds hires Lew Archer to
track down her former maid, who she claims has stolen her jewelry.
Archer can tell he's being fed a line, but curiosity gets the better
of him and he accepts the case. He tracks the wayward maid to a
ramshackle motel in a seedy, run-down small town, but finds her dead
in her tiny room, with her throat slit from ear to ear. Archer digs
deeper into the case and discovers a web of deceit and intrigue, with
crazed number-runners from Detroit, gorgeous triple-crossing molls,
and a golden-boy shipping heir who’s gone mysteriously missing.
Republished as
Marked for Murder
(1953)
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Find a Victim
(1955, 2001)
Las Cruces wasn’t a place most travelers would think to stop. But
after Lew Archer plays the good samaritan and picks up a bloodied
hitchhiker, he finds himself in town for a few days awaiting a murder
inquest. A hijacked truck full of liquor and an evidence box full of
marijuana, $20,000 from a big time bank heist by a small time crook,
corruption, adultery, incest, prodigal daughters and abused wives all
make the little town seem a lot more interesting than any guide book
ever could. And as the murder rate rises, Archer finds himself caught
up in mystery where everyone is a suspect and everyone’s a victim.)-
The Name Is Archer
(1955, 1971, 1991)
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The Barbarous Coast
(1956, 2007)
The beautiful, high-diving blonde had Hollywood
dreams and stars in her eyes but now she seems to have disappeared
without a trace. Hired by her hotheaded husband and her rummy “uncle,”
Lew Archer sniffs around Malibu and finds the stink of blackmail,
blood-money, and murder on every pricey silk shirt. Beset by dirty
cops, a bumptious boxer turned silver screen pretty boy and a
Hollywood mogul with a dark past, Archer discovers the secret of a
grisly murder that just won't stay hidden.
Lew Archer navigates through the watery, violent world of wealth and
privilege, in this electrifying story of obsession gone mad.
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The Doomsters
(1958, 2007)
Hired by Carl Hallman, the desperate-eyed junkie scion of an obscenely
wealthy political dynasty, detective Lew Archer investigates the
suspicious deaths of his parents, Senator Hallman and his wife Alicia.
Arriving in the sleepy town of Purissima, Archer discovers that orange
groves may be where the Hallmans made their mint, but they’ve has been
investing heavily in political intimidation and police brutality to
shore up their rancid wealth. However, after years of dastardly
double-crossing and low down dirty-dealing, the family seem to be on
the receiving end of a karmic death-blow. With two dead already and
another consigned to the nuthouse, Archer races to crack the secret
before another Hallman lands on the slab.
Murder, madness and greed grace The Doomsters, where a tony
façade masks the rot and corruption within.
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The Galton Case
(1959, 1996)
Anthony Galton disappeared almost 20 years ago. Now his aging--and
very rich--mother has hired Lew Archer to bring him back. What turns
up is a headless skeleton, a suspicious heir, and a con man whose
stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them.
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The Wycherly Woman
(1961, 1998)
Phoebe Wycherly was missing two months before her wealthy father hired
Archer to find her. That was plenty of time for a young girl who
wanted to disappear to do so thoroughly--or for someone to make her
disappear. Before he can find the Wycherly girl, Archer has to deal
with the Wycherly woman, Phoebe's mother, an eerily unmaternal blonde
who keeps too many residences, has too many secrets, and leaves too
many corpses in her wake.
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The Zebra-Striped Hearse
(1962, 1998)
A classic Lew Archer mystery from a Mystery Writers of America's Grand
Master. Archer is on a long, wild journey up and down the coasts of
California and Mexico trying to find the killer of two--more or
less--innocent people. The zebra-striped hearse is just another hazy
piece in this sinister puzzle facing the intrepid gumshoe.
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The Chill
(1964, 1996)
In The Chill a distraught young man hires Archer to track down
his runaway bride. But no sooner has he found Dolly Kincaid than
Archer finds himself entangled in two murders, one twenty years old,
the other so recent that the blood is still wet. What ensues is a
detective novel of nerve-racking suspense, desperately believable
characters, and one of the most intricate plots ever spun by an
American crime writer.
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The Far Side of the Dollar
(1965, 1998)
Has Tom Hillman run away from his exclusive reform school, or has he
been kidnapped? Are his wealthy parents protecting him or their own
guilty secrets? And why does every clue lead Lew Archer to an
abandoned Hollywood hotel, where starlets and sailors once rubbed
shoulders with grifters--and where the present clientele includes a
brand-new corpse.
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Black Money
(1966, 1996)
When Lew Archer is hired to get the goods on the suspiciously suave
Frenchman who's run off with his client's girlfriend, it looks like a
simple case of alienated affections. Things look different when the
mysterious foreigner turns out to be connected to a seven-year-old
suicide and a mountain of gambling debts. Black Money is Ross
Macdonald at his finest.
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Archer in Hollywood
(1967)
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Instant Enemy
(1968, 2008)
Generations of murder, greed and deception come home to roost in time
for the most shocking conclusion ever in a Lew Archer novel.
At first glance, it's an open-and-shut missing persons case: a
headstrong daughter has run off to be with her hothead juvenile
delinquent boyfriend. That is until this bush-league Bonnie & Clyde
kidnap Stephen Hackett, a local millionaire industrialist. Now, Archer
is offered a cool 100 Gs for his safe return by his coquettish heiress
mother who has her own mysterious ties to this disturbed duo. But the
deeper Archer digs, the more he realizes that nothing is as it seems
and everything is questionable. Is the boyfriend a psycho ex-con with
murder on the brain or a damaged youngster trying to straighten out
his twisted family tree? And is the daughter simply his nympho
sex-kitten companion in crime or really a fragile kid, trying to block
out horrific memories of bad acid and an unspeakable sex crime?
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The Goodbye Look
(1969)
In The Goodbye Look, Lew Archer is hired to investigate a
burglary at the mission-style mansion of Irene and Larry Chalmers. The
prime suspect, their son Nick, has a talent for disappearing, and the
Chalmerses are a family with money and memories to burn. As Archer
zeros in on Nick, he discovers a troubled blonde, a stash of wartime
letters, a mysterious hobo. Then a stiff turns up in a car on an empty
beach. And Nick turns up with a Colt .45. In The Goodbye Look,
Ross Macdonald delves into the world of the rich and the troubled and
reveals that the past has a deadly way of catching up to the present.
If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell
Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it is Ross Macdonald. Between the late
1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel a
psychological depth and moral complexity that his pre-decessors had
only hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, Macdonald
redefined the private eye as a roving conscience who walks the
treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin.
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Archer at Large
(1970)
Three novels:
Black Money,
The Chill,
and
The Galton Case
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The Underground Man
(1971, 1996)
As a mysterious fire rages through an affluent community in Southern
California, Lew Archer tracks a missing--and possibly kidnapped--child
and uncovers and entire secret history of wayward parents, wounded
offspring, and murder. Along with its merciless suspense, The
Underground Man possesses a moral vision as complex as that of a
classic Greek tragedy.
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Sleeping Beauty
(1973, 2000)
In Sleeping Beauty, Lew Archer finds himself the confidant of a
wealthy, violent family with a load of trouble on their
hands--including an oil spill, a missing girl, a lethal dose of
Nembutal, a six-figure ransom, and a stranger afloat, face down, off a
private beach. Here is Ross Macdonald's masterful tale of buried
memories, the consequences of arrogance, and the anguished relations
between parents and their children. Riveting, gritty, tautly written,
Sleeping Beauty is crime fiction at its best.
If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell
Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it is Ross Macdonald. Between the late
1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel a
psychological depth and moral complexity that his pre-decessors had
only hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, Macdonald
redefined the private eye as a roving conscience who walks the
treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin.
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The Blue Hammer
(1976, 2008)
The desert air is hot with sex and betrayal, death and madness and
only Archer can make sense of a killer who makes murder a work of art.
Finding a purloined portrait of a leggy blonde was supposed to be an
easy paycheck for Detective Lew Archer, but that was before the bodies
began piling up. Suddenly, Archer find himself smack in the middle of
a decades-long mystery of a brilliant artist who walked into the
desert and simply disappeared. He left behind a bevy of muses, molls,
dolls, and dames—each one scrambling for what they thought was
rightfully theirs.
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Lew Archer, Private Investigator
(1977)
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Archer In Jeopardy
(1979)
Ross MacDonald's unforgettable detective is Lew Archer. The wearily
wise, infinitely resourceful private investigator who so often finds in
the tangled past, with its long-buried guilty secrets, a fertile
source of clues to the murderous present.
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