Kenneth Millar, who wrote as Ross Macdonald, was the successor to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in the development of the hard-boiled detective story into serious literature. Millar wrote two dozen novels between 1944 and 1976, eighteen of them featuring Lew Archer, the character for whom he is best known. Success, both commercial and critical, came gradually through the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Tom Nolan in Ross Macdonald: A Biography (1999) writes, "When he died in 1983, Ross Macdonald was the best-known and most highly regarded crime-fiction writer in America." Millar's work continues to have an impact not only on readers but also on authors. Mystery novelist Stephen Greenleaf in the December 1993 issue of The Writer notes that "my inspiration came from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and, above all, Ross Macdonald, writers who wrestled the form out of the hands of the English masters and gave it an American...