The two most important literary techniques employed by Macdonald have either enthralled or enraged his readers. One of the stylistic devices he borrowed from Dashiell Hammett was the use of poetic asides or symbolic tropes, which often begin or end chapters. With these highly literary devices he sets the tone or sums up the tone of the intervening scenes. Often the purpose is a moral one which the symbolic descriptions, usually of nature, extend or expand into the natural world. Like a good Elizabethan, Ross Macdonald includes the natural in the corruption of his human world.

Second, Macdonald's use of ambiguity and irony deprive his books of any sense of salvation or catharsis. Micky Spillane's world remains dark, but Mike Hammer triumphs or at least exorcises his anger, and presumably the reader's, through the violence he directs towards the evil ones in the fiction. The world of Ross...