Born Kenneth Millar in San Francisco, the man who later became Ross Macdonald was raised in Canada, where many of his novels' plots have their origin. A talented writer of thrillers with a striking psychological bent, the earliest of which reveal a somewhat conspicuous debt to Raymond Chandler, Macdonald upped his game with The Moving Target. This, his fifth book, was the first in a series featuring private investigator Lew Archer, a tough, intelligent and likeable Los Angeles detective and, as well as being Archer's first bow, saw the author's books appearing under the byline of Ross Macdonald. Living in Santa Barbara after the war, Macdonald had plenty of opportunity to study the wayward inhabitants of southern California and he put this to excellent use, fashioning a highly perceptive portrayal of this idiosyncratic region. After ten years of perfecting his craft, using the Archer books to create substantial and dramatic studies of dysfunctional families, he wrote The Galton Case in 1959, a breakthrough novel and the first whose theme was the pursuit of identity, destined to be the prevalent topic in his subsequent work.

The Moving Target finds the private eye investigating the kidnapping of millionaire Ralph Sampson. A host of classic Californian grotesqueries emerge from the sunshine to be appraised by the shrewd sleuth, including a self-styled guru to whom Sampson has bequeathed his mountain retreat; his wife, a bitter invalid; his sultry daughter, who is being courted by both her father's young pilot and his ageing lawyer and a female jazz pianist, who is a drug addict. Although Archer is a sleeker, more upbeat version of Chandler's Philip Marlowe, and the book has many echoes of the classic noir works of the 1940s, it is an absolute gem and with it, Macdonald resolutely pointed the way forward for the American crime novel.

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