|
Lew Archer
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 building on the foundations of hardboiled fiction by introducing more literary themes and psychological depth to the 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, Macdona ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Moving Target
''The Moving Target'' is a detective novel by writer Ross Macdonald, first published by Alfred A. Knopf in April 1949. The novel ''The Moving Target'' introduces the detective Lew Archer, who was eventually to figure in a further seventeen novels. Up to this point Macdonald had been writing under the name Kenneth Millar, but adopted the pseudonym John Macdonald for this one. His first drafts were begun in 1947, using the working title of ''The Snatch''; its style was meant to be a refinement on hardboiled fiction, featuring a successor to Philip Marlowe. Macdonald's publisher was dissatisfied with the quality of the writing when it was first submitted and only accepted it after considerable revisions and a change of title. The new title derived from a conversation that Archer has in the novel with a young woman who describes the craving for excitement and risk-taking of her post-war generation as being like driving fast in hope of meeting "something utterly new. Something naked ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |