Talk:Ross Macdonald

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Heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American "hard boiled" mysteries, Macdonald's writing built on the pithy style of his predecessors by adding psychological depth and insights into the motivations of his characters. He fashioned descriptive metaphors, so aligned with their subjects ... sadness, horror, a place in time, a rise in the road ... that his works have an atmosphere of language that likely will last. Macdonald's plots were complicated, and often turned on Archer's unearthing family secrets of his clients and of the criminals who victimized them. Even his regular readers seldom saw a Macdonald denouement coming.

I don't like this at all and plan to rewrite it when toime allows - it's very POV Paul Tracy 15:48, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

For an excellent analysis of Macdonald's writing, and of F.Scott Fitzgerald's influenced on both Macdonald and Hammett: See: "Mystery Writers: Hammett and Macdonld," http://www.mysterywriters.blogspot.com/

All that appears to remain at the above link is this: "Yes, Dashiell Hammett influenced Ross Macdonald. But so too did F. Scott Fitzgerald. And perhaps he influenced Hammett as well. "Who shot him? I asked. The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said: Somebody with a gun." - Dashiell Hammett" TheScotch (talk) 23:41, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Problem with Links

Unfortunately, The Chill and The Underground Man link to things that have nothing to do with the Ross Macdonald novels of the same name. I fixed these by removing the links. Perhaps a better fix would be to create pages for these books but right now I don't have the time.ubiquity 15:55, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

The whole thing about the Canadian rancher and where he went to college probably needs to be deleted. MrSmith85 07:08, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Correspondence with Eudora Welty

Per The Wall Street Journal, Macdonald and Welty exchanged hundreds of letters, collected in Meanwhile There are Letters. I read in The Paris Review of the correspondence between Macdonald (nee Millar) and Welty:

"'This is my first fan letter,' Millar wrote. 'If you write another book like Losing Battles, it will not be my last.' Indeed, it wasn’t close to being his last. With the ice broken, Welty and Millar struck up an epistolary friendship that endured until his death in 1983, exchanging some 345 letters. Even after the onset of Alzheimer’s disease left Millar unable to reply, Welty wrote him. To read their correspondence, collected this summer in the excellent Meanwhile There Are Letters by Welty’s biographer Suzanne Marrs and Millar’s biographer Tom Nolan, is to eavesdrop on a long, nuanced conversation about literature, politics—'Oh God! I had to meet Pres. Nixon!' Welty wrote—and the victories and frustrations of life as a writer." (Eby, Margaret. "Will They or Won't They?" September 24, 2015. The Paris Review.)

I learn from the Eudora Welty Foundation that "In 1971 it was Welty who would praise Macdonald in a front-page New York Times Book Review essay on The Underground Man. The Lew Archer novel that followed, Sleeping Beauty (1973), would be dedicated to Eudora Welty. What began as a dialogue based on common interests and mutual admiration gradually morphed into a Platonic love affair between two gifted, caring and profoundly decent people. The exchange of letters would be two-sided until early in 1980 when Macdonald's advancing Alzheimer's disease made it impossible for him to write. Welty continued to write to him and visited him in Santa Barbra one last time in 1982, the year before his death." (Breen, L. Jon. "Pen Pals". Mystery Scene.)

It seems like this would be worth mentioning, as it's a correspondence between two major American authors in seemingly disparate genres. Charlie Faust (talk) 16:28, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Daughter Linda

There should be more in the article about his daughter Linda who drove drunk in her teens and hit 3 boys, killing one, yet got probation. It was a major news story in Santa Barbara at the time. 69.246.128.134 (talk) 00:22, 9 January 2024 (UTC)