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It took a hard-boiled detective writer to make the entire style respectable again. Ross Macdonald took the hardboiled detective novel out of the streets and into the suburbs. Macdonald started his career alternating psychological fiction (written under his real name, Kenneth Millar) and detective stories (written under the pseudonym "John Ross Macdonald," thus arousing the ire of John D. MacDonald, who reportedly never forgot and never forgave). Soon he fused the two forms; his hero, Lew Archer, named for Sam Spade's foolish partner, searches as much for psychic as for legal truth. In the paradigmatic Macdonald plot, the key to murder lies in family history. Characters pretend they have no past, only to discover that such a denial...