Biography

Crime novelist and creator of the private eye Lew Archer, Ross MacDonald is often linked to his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as a master of the "hard-boiled" school of detective fiction, but MacDonald added a psychological depth and a unity of theme which was unique.

MacDonald was born Kenneth Millar in Los Gatos, California. His parents were Canadian, and the family moved back to Canada when Kenneth was three, after which his father abandoned them. For most of his youth Millar was shunted around from relative to relative; at one point his mother even considered putting him in an orphanage but relented right at the orphanage gates, and poverty, rootlessness and the search for family would become major motifs in his work. He attended schools in Ontario, graduating from the University of Western Ontario in 1938, then doing graduate work at the University of Toronto and the University of Michigan.

He had been writing short, light pieces for school newspapers but turned to more serious work during a stint in the US Naval Reserve during World War II. His first books were published under his own name, but in 1949 he brought out "The Moving Target" under the pen name John MacDonald in order to avoid confusion with his wife, Margaret Millar, who also wrote crime fiction. However, John D. MacDonald, creator of the Travis McGee series, complained that John MacDonald was his own real name, and perhaps Millar should get another pen name, so he settled on Ross MacDonald.

"The Moving Target" marked the first appearance of Lew Archer; the name was taken from "Ben-Hur" author Lew Wallace and the name of Sam Spade's murdered partner Miles Archer in Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon." A moderate success, "The Moving Target" was followed by "The Drowning Pool" in 1950 (filmed later as The Drowning Pool (1975)) and 19 more, including "The Barbarous Coast" (1956), "The Galton Case" (1959), "The Wycherly Woman" (1961), "The Goodbye Look" (1969), "The Underground Man" (1971), "Sleeping Beauty" (1973) and his last, "The Blue Hammer" (1976).

During the 1960s and 1970s his critical reputation grew: he was the subject of a Newsweek cover story in 1971, and Nobel Prize-winning British author William Golding said that his works were "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American author." His audience base was widened with film versions of "The Moving Target" (as Harper (1966), with Paul Newman and "The Drowning Pool" (also with Newman, 1975). A film version of an early Kenneth Millar book, "Blue City" (1947, filmed as Blue City (1986)), was less successful.

MacDonald passed away at his home in Santa Barbara, California, after a three-year battle with Alzheimer's Disease.