Friday's "Forgotten" Books: The Archer Files

Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), born Kenneth Millar in Los Gatos, California, spent most of his early life in Canada, where his father worked as a harbor pilot. His parents separated when he was three, and since his mother suffered from typhoid fever and couldn't support them, he moved around among various relatives, once counting "the number of rooms I had lived in during my first sixteen years, and got a total of fifty."

In 1938 he married Margaret Sturm, who as Margaret Millar would have her own career as an acclaimed mystery writer. Between 1938 and 1939 Kenneth Millar studied at the University of Michigan where he met W.H. Auden, who encouraged him to regard detective novels as a legitimate literary form.  Millar eventually settled on the pen name Ross Macdonald to avoid mixups with contemporary John D. MacDonald.  Ross first introduced the popular divorced former cop-turned-private-eye Lew Archer in the 1946 short story "Find the Woman." A full-length novel, The Moving Target, followed in 1949, the first in a series of 18 Archer novels.

Macdonald used spiral-bound notebooks, filling about three pages a day while sitting in the same bedroom chair where he wrote all of his books for three decades. He worked on several books at once, often finding ideas for plots by sitting in on local criminal trials. He was a dedicated conservationist, and he and his wife were active in the efforts to save the California condor from extinction. He died from Alzheimer's disease in 1983.

In 2007, Crippen & Landru released a new anthology of Macdonald's Lew Archer short stories, collected together in one volume for the first time. Titled The Archer Files, The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator Including Newly Discovered Case Notes, the volume includes previously published stories and several never-before-published fragments of unfinished Macdonald stories—case notes, so to speak, from the files of Lew Archer.

Novelist William Goldman declared the Archer canon as "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American," and John Leonard of The New York Times stated Macdonald had transcended the genre to become "a major American novelist." His works have inspired countless mystery writers since, such as Sue Grafton, who even set her novels in the same Santa Barbara locale Macdonald had done (although both used the fictional name Santa Teresa for the town).

On a January Magazine tribute page via Jeff Pierce, you'll many fun anecdotes about Macdonald and his influence, such as the following from Michael Connelly:  "I came to him late. The first book of his I read was The Blue Hammer. Of course, it was a joy to realize when I was finished that I had a wealth of Lew Archer stories to go back and read. And I did. This was about the time I was thinking that I wanted to write for a living and Macdonald's books showed me the possibility that crime novels could be art. I still remember in the opening pages of The Blue Hammer how he described a woman's body as having been kept trim by tennis and anger. I read that and knew I was on to something. I was home."

Comments

[Art Taylor]

Thanks for giving a shout-out to this great collection!

[BV Lawson]

I was captivated the first time I read one of Macdonald's Lew Archer stories, and I'm just happy Crippen & Landru released this collection! Kudos to them for the publication, for sure.