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Ross Macdonald

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Author

The Resume

    (December 13, 1915-July 11, 1983)
    Born in Las Gatos, California
    Birth name was Kenneth Millar
    Created the private detective Lew Archer
    Wrote the novels 'The Moving Target' (1949), 'The Drowning Pool' (1950), 'The Way Some People Die' (1951), 'The Doomsters' (1958), 'The Galton Case' (1959), 'The Zebra-Striped Hearse' (1962), 'Black Money' (1966), 'Sleeping Beauty ' (1973) and 'The Blue Hammer' (1976)

Why he might be annoying:

    As a teen, he was a heavy drinker, a street fighter and a petty thief.
    He used a pseudonym while writing mysteries so he could save his real name for 'serious' fiction (which he never got around to writing).
    He originally called himself John Ross Macdonald until fellow mystery author John D. MacDonald complained.
    Raymond Chandler complained about his 'pretentiousness' and called him a 'literary eunuch.'

Why he might not be annoying:

    His father abandoned the family.
    He shuttled between various relatives growing up, and estimated he had lived at 50 different addresses before he was 16.
    He added psychological depth to the hard-boiled detective genre.
    Writing in the New York Times, William Goldman called the Lew Archer stories 'the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.'
    Sue Grafton wrote, 'If Dashiell Hammett can be said to have injected the hard-boiled detective novel with its primitive force, and Raymond Chandler gave shape to its prevailing tone, it was Ken Millar, writing as Ross Macdonald, who gave the genre its current respectability.'

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 13 Votes: 69.23% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 6 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 7 Votes: 57.14% Annoying
    In 2015, Out of 9 Votes: 55.56% Annoying
    In 2014, Out of 14 Votes: 50.0% Annoying