Today marks the birthday of crime fiction author Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), the pseudonym of American-Canadian writer Kenneth Millar. Macdonald attended the University of Michigan, where he was Phi Beta Kappa key and earned a Ph.D in literature. He began his career writing stories for pulp magazines but is best known for his acclaimed series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer.
The Rap Sheet had a fairly recent posting about him with appropriate links, including one to an essay in The Guardian by Tobias Jones who said that, though Macdonald was hailed as one of the holy trinity of American crime writers, Macdonald "surpassed his predecessors Chandler and Hammett writing detective novels informed by sorrows and by Freud."
Several movies have been made from Macdonald novels, and there may be one in the works based on the Galton Case. Since that project has been "in development" since 2006, however, it doesn't appear to be on the front burner. In the meantime, you can check out the brief TV series Archer from 1975 starring Brian Keith or one of the two movies starring Paul Newman, The Drowning Pool or Harper (as Lew Harper, not Archer).
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