Ross Macdonald

Lew Archer Books
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One of the Big Three of detective fiction, the others being Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Macdonalds's Lew Archer series started in the heyday of the private eye, thelate 40s and early 50s, and continued through to the 70s, along the way inspiring young writers like Michael Collins and Joseph Hansen.

Although Archer started life as more or less a direct clone of Chandler's Philip Marlowe, as the series went on Macdonald moved away from the classic mode of detective fiction. After a family tragedy resulted in psychiatric counselling, he began to write of crimes driven by deeply hidden secrets. Beginning in The Galton Case, Archer's cases became more excavations of the past than investigations of present crimes, except of course that the two always seemed tied together.

Archer was never cast in the mold of the tough guy action-hero detective, and as time went on Macdonald more and more chose the "I am the camera" approach, with Archer frequently more an observer than an active participant.

The books are so uniformly good that half a dozen titles have been mentioned as "the best", from The Galton Case to Black Money to The Underground Man. My own favorite: The Chill. But they're all good.