Facing Up to Macdonald’s Fiction

As I already noted in The Rap Sheet, today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kenneth Millar, who—using the byline “Ross Macdonald”—would write two dozen crime novels between the 1940s and the 1970s. Eighteen of those would star an especially compassionate Los Angeles private eye named Lew Archer.

My introduction to Macdonald came during high school, when I devoured the first book in the Archer series, The Moving Target (later to be adapted into the Paul Newman film Harper.) Although that novel was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1949, I had access only to a much later edition, a paperback version released by Bantam Books in the 1970s. It was part of a series of Macdonald works, all using the same cover-design format, which featured bold and shadowed serif type, with narrow panels at the bottom through which could be glimpsed portions of photographs, most often featuring women. (That format was also used in the main opening titles for the 1974 NBC-TV pilot film The Underground Man, starring Peter Graves and based on Macdonald’s 1971 novel of the same name.)

I wound up collecting most of those Bantam editions, though I missed two—The Wycherly Woman and Black Money—probably because I began buying them all at a time when they were being replaced by newer editions. Those paperbacks have traveled with me from apartment to apartment, house to house over the years, and they still make up a prized part of my crime-fiction library. Earlier today, as I was writing about Macdonald for The Rap Sheet, I pulled those handsome Bantam editions off my shelves and scanned them. You can see the results above and below (click for enlargements).













My recollection is that The Goodbye Look was the final Macdonald novel to follow that familiar Bantam format. In the late ’70s, new cover illustrations were commissioned from American artist Mitchell Hooks. Being young at the time, I didn’t realize how interesting those revised paperback editions looked, so failed to pick up any but the last installment in the Archer series: The Blue Hammer.

Incidentally, it wasn’t only Macdonald’s Archer tales that were uniformly formatted by Bantam during the 1970s. So were his less-well-remembered, non-Archer novels, including Trouble Follows Me, Blue City, Meet Me at the Morgue, and The Ferguson Affair.





Finally, let me pose a question: How many of you out there still have some of these Bantam Macdonald editions decorating your tall bookcases? They used to be everywhere!

READ MORE: “Two New Lews” and “Getting Hooks into Archer,”
by J. Kingston Pierce (Killer Covers).