Lew Archer is a fictional character created by American-Canadian writer Ross Macdonald. Archer is a private detective working in Southern California. Between the late 1940s and the early '70s, the character appeared in 18 novels and a handful of shorter works as well as several film and television adaptations. Macdonald's Archer novels have been praised for introducing more literary themes and psychological depth to the hardboiled fiction genre. Critic John Leonard declared that Macdonald had surpassed the limits of crime fiction to become "a major American novelist", while author Eudora Welty was a fan of the series and carried on a lengthy correspondence with Macdonald. The editors of Thrilling Detective wrote: "The greatest P.I. series ever written? Probably."

Profile

Initially, Lew Archer was similar to (if not completely a derivative of) Philip Marlowe, the pioneering sleuth created by Raymond Chandler in the 1930s. However, Macdonald eventually broke largely from that mold. Archer's principal difference from the tough Marlowe is that he is much more openly sensitive and empathetic. Also, whereas Chandler's books were primarily studies of Marlowe's character and code of honor, Macdonald used Archer as a lens to explore the relationships of the other characters in the novels. Macdonald wrote, "Certainly my narrator Archer is not the main object of my interest, nor the character with whose fate I am most concerned," nor the novels' "emotional center." Tom Nolan in his Ross Macdonald, A Biography, wrote of the author, "Gradually he swapped the hard-boiled trappings for more subjective themes: personal identity, the family secret, the family scapegoat, the childhood trauma; how men and women need and battle each other, how the buried past rises like a skeleton to confront the present. He brought the tragic drama of Sophocles and the psychology of Freud to detective stories, and his prose flashed with poetic imagery." Philosophical references underlined the thoughtful tone of the novels, with The Chill (1964) having mentions of Parmenides, Heraclitus and Achilles and the tortoise, while Black Money (1966) briefly discusses Henri Bergson.

Two recurring characters of note are Arnie and Phyllis Walters, who appear in several of the novels and seem to enjoy a warm friendship with Archer. Arnie is a private detective in Reno, Nevada, about 470 miles north of Los Angeles, where Archer's investigations sometimes lead, due to Nevada then both having some of the most liberal marriage and divorce laws in the nation and being one of the only states with legalized casino gambling (and its associated organized crime presence).

Archer's name pays a double homage: first to Dashiell Hammett ("Miles Archer" was Sam Spade's murdered partner in The Maltese Falcon),

Recognition

According to a New York Times article, "some critics ranked him [Macdonald] among the best American novelists of his generation". William Goldman of the newspaper's Book Review section wrote that the Archer books were "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American".

Over his career, Macdonald was presented with several awards, primarily for his Lew Archer series. In 1964, the Mystery Writers of America awarded the author the Silver Dagger award for The Chill. Ten years later, he received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and in 1982 he received "The Eye", the Lifetime Achievement Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. In 1982, he was awarded the Robert Kirsch Award (the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) by the Los Angeles Times for "an outstanding body of work by an author from the West or featuring the West."

Books

Novels

  1. The Moving Target (1949)
  2. The Drowning Pool (1950)
  3. The Way Some People Die (1951)
  4. The Ivory Grin (1952; aka Marked for Murder)
  5. Find a Victim (1954)
  6. The Barbarous Coast (1956)
  7. The Doomsters (1958)
  8. The Galton Case (1959)
  9. The Wycherly Woman (1961)
  10. The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962)
  11. The Chill (1964)
  12. The Far Side of the Dollar (1965)
  13. Black Money (1966)
  14. The Instant Enemy (1968)
  15. The Goodbye Look (1969)
  16. The Underground Man (1971)
  17. Sleeping Beauty (1973)
  18. The Blue Hammer (1976)

Short stories

  • "Find the Woman" (June 1946, EQMM)
  • "The Bearded Lady" (American Magazine, October 1948)
  • "The Imaginary Blonde" (February 1953, Manhunt; AKA Gone Girl)
  • "The Guilty Ones" (May 1953, Manhunt; AKA The Sinister Habit)
  • "The Beat-Up Sister" (October 1953, Manhunt; AKA The Suicide)
  • "Guilt-Edged Blonde" (January 1954, Manhunt)
  • "Wild Goose Chase" (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July 1954)
  • "Midnight Blue" (October 1960, Ed McBain's Mystery Magazine)
  • "The Sleeping Dog" (April 1965, Argosy)

:in three collections: The Name Is Archer, Lew Archer, Private Investigator, and Strangers in Town

Adaptations

Film

The character has been adapted for visual media several times:

Two feature films starring Paul Newman