Ross MacDonald Books In Order

Publication Order of Lew Archer Books

Publication Order of Lew Archer Collections

Publication Order of Chet Gordon Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Ross MacDonald is a Canadian and American author of fiction. It is the pen name of Kenneth Millar. He was born in 1915 and died in 1983. He is the author of crime fiction and mystery novels. He is considered to be one of the masters when it comes to the genre of hard boiled mystery, along with Raymond Chandler and Dashell Hammet.

Kenneth Millar was born in California and he went on to be educated in not only Canada but the University of Michigan. He went on to teach there. He married fellow writer Margaret Millar in 1938. Millar also served in the U.S. Naval Reserve in the years 1944 to 1946. His first novel was published in 1944 and is titled The Dark Tunnel. It is also known by the title I Die Slowly.

His first Lew Archer story, The Moving Target, was published in 1949. It is also known by the title Harper. These series of novels were set in Southern California. The plots were pretty complex and usually followed Archer sifting through family secrets. The first story was followed by The Drowning Pool in 1950, The Way Some People Die in 1951, and countless other novels made their way into the series. The first two novels in the series were made into feature films that starred Paul Newman in the role of Lew Harper.
The last in the series was titled The Blue Hammer and it was released in 1976.

Kenneth Millar is also the author of the 1947 standalone fiction novel Blue City. MacDonald has also authored Meet Me at the Morgue and The Ferguson Affair. He has contributed to the collection Strangers in Town, which was released and features work he did and is the first of what has been published after his death. Ross Macdonald has also had his stories featured in a few anthologies, from The Master’s Choice Book 2 to Great Tales of Mystery and Suspense.

His short stories include ‘Gone Girl’ and ‘Midnight Blue’. Books written about him include Ross MacDonald, by Bernard Schopen, and Tom Nolan’s Ross MacDonald: A Biography.

The Dark Tunnel is the first in the Chet Gordon series of novels. This novel was very popular at the time and this thriller is one of the top classics and still is interesting to this day! Under a cloud of paranoia taking place on the home front, two lovers from wartime reunite in a thriller novel from MacDonald.

The time is 1937, and the place is Munich in Germany. It is the type of place that an American has to be careful, even when they are just trying to have a smoke. Robert Branch is lighting his pipe up, something that he normally does. But the careless academic is not paying close enough attention, and he nearly gets beaten up for it because the Fuhrer is about to be at the start of a procession. He’s risking getting the life kicked out of him when a beautiful woman comes to his rescue.

Ruth Esch, an actress with hair the color of flames, comes to the academic’s timely rescue. The chance intervention and act of kindness sparks something between them, and east and west come together in a torrid affair. It’s amazing while it lasts, but it’s destined to come to an end. When they make the error of defending a Jew in public, the academic finally gets the beating he outran all those months before. But even worse, it earns the actress he is in love with a ticket to the concentration camps.

The time is six years later, and Ruth escapes out of the camps and makes her way to the city of Detroit. She never thought that he would be there, but the academic is there and waiting for her all these years later. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he is a professor. He makes his living working for the war effort. But there’s something about his thinking that makes their reunion go wrong– paranoid over a spy inside the Motor City war board.

it seems that they can never meet in a peaceful time. No matter where they try to be together, something about the war or society or the times always intervenes. With danger lurking around the corner, Branch and Esch realize that these are dangerous times– and that in this era, death may conquer love all too often. What happens in this tense novel from Ross MacDonald? Pick it up to find out!

Trouble Follows Me is the second in the Chet Gordon series of novels. It was released in 1946 and is also known by the title Night Train. In the ending days of the second world war, a transcontinental conspiracy is accidentally dug up by a sailor. The time is 1945, and it’s February. The war in the Pacific is reaching its inevitable conclusion.

Sam Drake is an ensign in the U.S. Navy. When he comes across the girl of his dreams, he cannot believe his good luck. She’s unusual in that she is a disc jockey that also has a voice that is pretty well-known across the islands. Mary plays jazz into the late nights that nobody can resist. But before he can see what she’s up to, they go to check on her coworker Sue to see how she’s doing.

Unfortunately, Sue is never going to play another record again in her life, because she’s dead. There’s no chance of it being an accident either, as she is strung up and hanging outside the bathroom window. It’s not pretty, and she’s passed away in a horrific manner. Even though the officials call it a suicide, not everyone is sure that it’s actually happened in that manner.

Sam doesn’t know what to think about it all, but he knows it wasn’t a suicide. Beautiful women like that don’t just throw in the towel and are going to kill themselves in that way to look so ugly when they’re gone. But when Sam starts looking into things, he doesn’t like what he finds. There’s not only another body in the rearview mirror but a conspiracy in play that might go all the way back home to Motor City. What happens? Pick up Trouble Follows Me to find out!