Most Recent Role: on Pursuit
Alias Name(s): Kenneth Millar
Gender: Male
Birthplace: Los Gatos, California
Birthday: 12-15-1915
Birth Name: Kenneth Millar
Date of Death: 7-11-1983
Cause of Death: Natural causes
Alias Name(s): Kenneth Millar
Gender: Male
Birthplace: Los Gatos, California
Birthday: 12-15-1915
Birth Name: Kenneth Millar
Date of Death: 7-11-1983
Cause of Death: Natural causes
Regarded as the primary heir to the "hard-boiled" school of detective fiction, Ross MacDonald is best known for his series of novels starring private eye Lew Archer.
Born Kenneth Millar, he was raised in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. In 1938, he met and married Margaret Sturm. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970. He began his career as a pulp magazine...
Rumor has it that Paul Newman asked screenwriter William Goldman to change the name of Lew Archer to Lew Harper to continue a streak of successful movies beginning with the letter H (The Hustler, Hud). Thus, the film adaptation of The Moving Target is called Harper.
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The character of Lew Archer, MacDonald's famous private eye, has been played on-screen by Paul Newman, Peter Graves and Brian Keith.
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After his parents seperated, Ross MacDonald lived with his maternal grandparents. His biographer, Tom Nolan, wrote, "Their presence caused problems. They moved out into furnished rooms. The boy blamed himself for this, as he'd blamed himself for his father's having gone away."
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When the 1964 Coyote Canyon fire came within a few hundred yards of their house, MacDonald stayed behind to hose down the house. Only a wind shift saved him. He later used the fire as the background for his Archer novel The Underground Man.
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Ross MacDonald and his wife both became increasingly involved in local ecological causes later in life. They worked for land-use planning, and for preservation of the Santa Barbara Channel, where whales migrated. Both he and his wife were active in the protests against the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill (which he used as the central event of his 1973 novel Sleeping Beauty).
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Ross MacDonald: We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.
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Ross MacDonald: As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him,, the women he likes are getting older too. The trouble is that most of them are married.
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Ross MacDonald: When there's trouble in a family, it tends to show up in the weaqkest member. And all the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble... because they know they're implicated themselves.
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Ross MacDonald: There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns -- different states, if possible -- and write each other letters once a year.
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Ross MacDonald: I knew how it was with drunks. They ran out of generosity, even for themselves.
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Other Appearances
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Archer
Creator |
Pursuit
Epitaph For A Golden Girl Story |
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