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“My subject is human error,” Ross Macdonald once told his publisher. Of all the hard-boiled gumshoes who followed Philip Marlowe down the mean streets of California, Macdonald's Lew Archer, who appeared in 18 titles from 1949 to 1973, was the best. The Archer books are darker, more complex and - in some opinions at least - better written than those of Hammett and Chandler, and Macdonald (real name Kenneth Millar) went on to be a key influence on writers such as James Ellroy and James Lee Burke. Troubled relationships, reflecting the break-up of his parents' marriage, emerge in novels such as The Barbarous Coast, while Freudian themes, mirroring Macdonald's experience of psychotherapy, emerge in The Galton Case, in which an old woman hires Archer to find a son missing for 20 years. Some have detected allusions to Greek tragedy.
One to read: The Barbarous Coast (1956)
Lew Archer: the greatest private investigator series ever written?
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