This article is about Ross Macdonald, the author. For the Canadian sailor see Ross MacDonald.
Ross Macdonald is the pseudonym of American-Canadian writer of mystery fiction and detective fiction Kenneth Millar (December 13, 1915 - July 11, 1983). Born near San Francisco, in Los Gatos, California 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.
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. 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. The very successful Lew Archer series, including bestsellers "The Goodbye Look", "The Underground Man", and "Sleeping Beauty", concluded with "The Blue Hammer" in 1976.
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.
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 California in 1983.
