Happy birthday, Raymond Chandler

It is the birthday of writer Raymond Chandler (1888), who created the iconic cynical detective Philip Marlowe, and was one of the founders of the hard-boiled detective novel genre. Chandler's Marlowe was a complex character, more than a typical tough guy. He was educated, enjoyed classical music and chess, spoke Spanish. He had few friends. Chandler only wrote seven novels that were published during his lifetime: The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), The Long Goodbye (1953), Playback (1958). When he died in 1959, he had been working on an eighth novel (Poodle Springs (1989). Robert B. Parker finished it and it was published on Chandler's 100th birthday. Chandler also wrote nine short story collections and the screenplays for Double Indemnity (1944), And Now Tomorrow (1944), The Unseen (1945), The Blue Dahlia (1946), Strangers on a Train (1951) and Playback, which was rejected so Chandler reworked it as a novel. Eleven films were adapted from Chandler's writing.

Ross Macdonald wrote Lew Archer series

Ross Macdonald

It is the birthday of American-Canadian writer Kenneth Millar (1915), who created the fictional hardboiled detective Lew Archer and wrote under the pseudonym Ross Macdonald. He produced such bestsellers as The Goodbye Look (1969), The Underground Man (1971), Sleeping Beauty (1973), and The Blue Hammer (1976).

Lew Archer is the heir apparent to Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's hardboiled detective. Both were based in California and both were tough as they come but Archer was more openly sensitive than his predecessor. Archer's name came from another fictional detective Miles Archer, who was Sam Spade's partner in the series by Dashiell Hammett, and from Lew Wallace who wrote Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Lew Archer first appeared in 1946 in short story Find the Woman.

Millar lived in for three decades in Santa Barbara, California, and used it as the setting for most of his books, renaming it Santa Teresa. Later, mystery writer Sue Grafton set her alphabet novels in Santa Teresa.

There are 18 books in the Lew Archer series. The first one, The Moving Target (1949), was adapted for film as Harper (1966), starring Paul Newman. Scholars say Millar's first books were closely patterned after Chandler and Hammett. Millar, who held a doctorate in literature, drew on classic Greek myths for inspiration and post-war California for locale. His later works introduced more personal themes such as childhood trauma, the family secret, and the family scapegoat.

Millar first used John Macdonald as his pen name to avoid confusion with his wife Margaret Millar, who was becoming well known as a mystery and suspense writer, too. Then he changed briefly to John Ross Macdonald but that created confusion with John D. MacDonald, of Travis McGee fame. So Millar finally settled on Ross Macdonald.