Ross Macdonald

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Ross Macdonald
BornKenneth Millar
(1915-12-13)December 13, 1915
Los Gatos, California, U.S.
DiedJuly 11, 1983(1983-07-11) (aged 67)
Santa Barbara, California, U.S.
Pen nameJohn Macdonald, John Ross Macdonald, Ross Macdonald
OccupationNovelist
Alma materUniversity of Western Ontario, University of Michigan
GenreCrime fiction
Spouse
(m. 1938)
Children1

Ross Macdonald was the main pseudonym used by the American-Canadian writer of

Ontario, Canada, Macdonald eventually settled in the state of California
, where he died in 1983.

The

Dorothy Sayers between 'the literature of escape' and 'the literature of expression.' These novels, triumphs of his literary alchemy, dare to be both."[12]

Life

Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his Canadian parents' native Kitchener, Ontario. Millar was a Scots spelling of the surname Miller, and the author pronounced his name Miller rather than Millar.[13] When his father abandoned the family unexpectedly when Millar was four years old, he and his mother lived with various relatives, and he had moved several times by his 16th year. Back in Canada as a young adult, he returned to Kitchener, where he studied, and subsequently graduated from the University of Western Ontario with an Honors degree in History and English. He found work as a high school teacher.[14] Some years later, he attended the University of Michigan and received a PhD in 1952. He married Margaret Sturm in 1938, though they'd known each other earlier in high school. They had a daughter in 1939, Linda, who died in 1970.[15][16] The family moved from Kitchener to Santa Barbara in 1946.[17]

Millar began his career writing stories for

W.H. Auden, who (unusually for a prominent literary intellectual of the era) held mystery or detective fiction could rise to the level of literature and encouraged Millar's interest in the genre.[13]

For his fifth novel, in 1949, he wrote under the name John Macdonald (his father's first and middle names) in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar. He then changed his pen name briefly to John Ross Macdonald, before settling on Ross Macdonald (Ross borrowed from a favorite cousin) in order to avoid being confused with fellow mystery writer John D. MacDonald, who was writing under his real name.[13] Millar would use the pseudonym "Ross Macdonald" on all his fiction from the mid '50s forward.[16]

Most of his books were set primarily in and around his adopted hometown of Santa Barbara. In these works, the city where Lew Archer is based goes under the fictional name of Santa Teresa.

In 1983 Macdonald died of Alzheimer's disease.[15]

Work

Macdonald first introduced the tough but humane private eye

Ben-Hur, though the character was patterned on Philip Marlowe. Macdonald also said the surname "Archer" was inspired by his own astrological sign of Sagittarius the archer.[13]

The novels were hailed by genre fans and literary critics alike.[19] He has been called the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries.[20]

Macdonald's writing built on the pithy style of his predecessors by adding psychological depth and insights into the motivations of his characters.[21] His plots, described as of "baroque splendor", were complicated and often turned on Archer's unearthing family secrets of upwardly mobile clients, sometimes going back over several generations.[22] Lost or wayward sons and daughters were a theme common to many of the novels.[23] Critics have commented favorably on Macdonald's deft combination of the two sides of the mystery genre, the "whodunit" and the psychological thriller.[24] Even his regular readers seldom saw a Macdonald denouement coming.

Tom Nolan, Macdonald's biographer, wrote,

"By any standard he was remarkable. His first books, patterned on Hammett and Chandler, were at once vivid chronicles of a postwar California and elaborate retellings of Greek and other classic myths. Gradually he swapped the hard-boiled trappings for more subjective themes: personal identity, the family secret, the family scapegoat, the childhood trauma; how men and women need and battle each other, how the buried past rises like a skeleton to confront the present. He brought the tragic drama of Freud and the psychology of Sophocles to detective stories, and his prose flashed with poetic imagery."[13]

Recognition

The Lew Archer novels are recognized as some of the most significant American mystery books of the mid 20th century, bringing a literary sophistication to the genre. The critic John Leonard declared that Macdonald had surpassed the limits of crime fiction to become "a major American novelist".[25] William Goldman, who adapted Macdonald's The Moving Target to film as Harper in 1966, called his works "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American".[26] A later film adaptation was The Drowning Pool (1975), also starring Paul Newman as the detective "Lew Harper".[27] In addition, The Underground Man was adapted as a TV movie in 1974.[28]

Over his career, Macdonald was presented with several awards. In 1964, the

The Chill. Ten years later, he received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and in 1982 he received "The Eye," the Lifetime Achievement Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. In 1982, he was awarded the Robert Kirsch Award by the Los Angeles Times for "an outstanding body of work by an author from the West or featuring the West."[29]

Bibliography

Writing as Kenneth Millar

These first four novels, all non-series standalones, were initially published using Millar's real name, but have since been intermittently reissued using his literary pseudonym, Ross Macdonald.

Other non-series novels

Two later non-series novels were also published:

Lew Archer

Novels

  1. The Moving Target – 1949 (credited to John Macdonald, filmed with Paul Newman as Harper, 1966)
  2. The Drowning Pool – 1950 (also filmed with Paul Newman as The Drowning Pool, 1975)
  3. The Way Some People Die – 1951
  4. The Ivory Grin (aka Marked for Murder) – 1952
  5. Find a Victim – 1954
  6. The Barbarous Coast – 1956
  7. The Doomsters – 1958
  8. The Galton Case – 1959
  9. The Wycherly Woman – 1961
  10. The Zebra-Striped Hearse – 1962
  11. The Chill
    – 1964
  12. The Far Side of the Dollar – 1965 (1965 CWA Gold Dagger Award winner)
  13. Black Money – 1966
  14. The Instant Enemy – 1968
  15. The Goodbye Look – 1969 (filmed as Tayna 1992)
  16. The Underground Man – 1971 (filmed as a television series pilot in 1974)
  17. Sleeping Beauty
    – 1973
  18. The Blue Hammer – 1976

Short story collections

Omnibuses

British omnibuses

Allison & Busby published three Archer omnibus editions in the 1990s.

Non-fiction

  • On Crime Writing – 1973, Santa Barbara : Capra Press, Series title: Yes! Capra chapbook series; no. 11, The Library of Congress bibliographic information includes this note: "Writing The Galton case."
  • Self-Portrait, Ceaselessly Into the Past – 1981, Santa Barbara : Capra Press, collection of book prefaces, magazine articles and interviews.

Notes

  1. .
  2. .
  3. .
  4. .
  5. .
  6. ^ Grogg, Samuel L. (1974). Between the Mountains and the Sea: Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer Novels (Thesis).
  7. ^ Michael Kreyling. “Lew Archer, House Whisperer.” South Central review. 27.1 (2010): 123–143. Web.
  8. JSTOR 43959251
    .
  9. .
  10. .
  11. .
  12. . Retrieved October 24, 2023.
  13. ^
  14. ^ Flash From the Past: Raised in Kitchener, read around the world 23 October 2020
  15. ^ a b Flash From the Past: Kitchener writers’ family lives were like a bad plot 6 November 2020
  16. ^ a b Weinman, Sarah (November 24, 2020). "Linda, Interrupted". CrimeReads. Retrieved November 24, 2020.
  17. ^ Ross Macdonald Invented Modern Detective Lew Archer 13 October 2015
  18. ^ Flash From the Past: Famous 20th century private eye is rooted in Kitchener July 10, 2020
  19. .
  20. .
  21. .
  22. ^ Geoffrey O'Brien, Hardboiled America, Van Norstrand Reinhold, 1981, pp.125-8
  23. ^ Jones, Tobias (July 31, 2009). "A passion for mercy". The Guardian. Retrieved May 19, 2013.
  24. .
  25. ^ J. Kingston Pierce, "50 Years with Lew Archer: An Anniversary Tribute to Ross Macdonald and his Heroic Yet Passionate Private Eye", January Magazine.
  26. ^ New York Times archive
  27. ^ "The Drowning Pool", Encyclopedia Britannica
  28. ^ Movietone News 32, June 1974
  29. ^ Mystery Writer Ross Macdonald, 67, Dies July 13, 1983

References

External links

  • Marling, William, "Hard-Boiled Fiction", Case Western Reserve University
  • J. Kingston Pierce, "50 Years with Lew Archer: An Anniversary Tribute to Ross Macdonald and His Heroic Yet Compassionate Private Eye, [1] by January Magazine, April 1999]
  • Lew Archer oder:Der Detektiv als Statthalter konkreter Utopie An interview with Macdonald
  • Leonard Cassuto, "The last testament of Ross Macdonald", The Boston Globe, 11/2/2003