Lew Archer

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 from that mold, though some similarities remain. Archer's principal difference is that he is much more openly sensitive and empathetic than the tough Marlowe. He also serves a different function from Marlowe. Chandler's books were primarily studies of Marlowe's character and code of honor, while 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," and moreover that Archer "is not their [the novels'] emotional center."[5]

Another subtle difference was that Marlowe prowled the city of Los Angeles during the 1940s, while Lew Archer primarily worked the suburbs in the 1950s, moving outward with the populace. Like Marlowe, Archer observes growing dichotomies in American society with visual "snapshots". In The Zebra-Striped Hearse, Archer hunts a missing girl who may be dead, possibly murdered. His path repeatedly crosses a group of young surfers who own a hearse painted in gay zebra stripes. To the youngsters, death is remote and funny. To the world-weary detective, it's close and grim.

Lew Archer is largely a cipher, rarely described. His background is most thoroughly explored in The Moving Target: he got his training with the Long Beach California Police Department, but left (Archer himself says he was "fired") after witnessing too much corruption. Subsequent novels mentioned details of Archer's life only in passing. In Black Money (1966) Archer mentions that he's about 50 years old, thus born circa 1916. In The Doomsters a sheriff mocks his 6'2" and blue eyes. As old failures plague him, we learn he once "took the strap away from my old man", that he was a troubled kid and petty thief redeemed by an old cop, that he sometimes drank too much, that his ex-wife's name is Sue, and he thinks of her often. During World War II, he served in military intelligence in the United States Army, again mentioned in The Doomsters.

Archer is sometimes depressed, often world-weary. An almost Greek sense of tragedy pervades the novels as the sins of omission and crimes of sometimes-wealthy parents are frequently visited upon their children, young adults whom Archer tries desperately to save from disaster. This use of Greek drama was deliberate, e.g., Macdonald based The Galton Case (1959) on a loose interpretation of the Oedipus myth.[5] Key incidents in the novels are typically separated by fifteen years, a scant generation, as evidence from old crimes surfaces to haunt new characters. As suspense in a novel builds toward a climax, Archer often gets little or no sleep, racing the clock and prowling the suburban Southern California landscape day after night after day, trying to put the pieces of a puzzle together in order to prevent new violence. This 36- or 48-hour wakefulness mimes the classic Greek tragic play where everything takes place in one day; here it might be more than a day, but since the character doesn't get to sleep, it essentially honors the tragic convention and contributes to the sense of unalterable impending doom. Tom Nolan in his Ross Macdonald, A Biography,[6] 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.

The only 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. Archer sometimes calls upon Arnie for assistance with cases that lead to Nevada. Archer's investigations sometimes lead from California to Nevada, due in part to Nevada then having some of the most liberal marriage and divorce laws in the nation, and also due to Nevada then being one of the only states with legalized casino gambling and the associated organized crime presence.

Archer's name pays a double homage: first to Dashiell Hammett ("Miles Archer" was the name of Sam Spade's murdered partner in The Maltese Falcon [7]), while Lew Wallace was the author of the novel Ben Hur (1880).[8]

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".[9]

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."[10]

• Lew Archer on ThrillingDetective.com
• Lew Archer series at Good Reads.com