Ross MacDonald

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Ross MacDonald's Latest Book

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  • Bibliography:
    41 Books (1 Series)
  • First Book:
    January 1944
  • Latest Book:
    October 2021
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Full Series List in Order

A Lew Archer Mystery

1 - The Moving Target (1949)
2 - The Drowning Pool (1950)
3 - The Way Some People Die (1951)
4 - The Ivory Grin // Marked For Murder (1952)
5 - Find a Victim (1954)
6 - The Barbarous Coast (1956)
7 - The Doomsters (1958)
8 - The Galton Case (1959)
9 - The Wycherly Woman (1961)
10 - The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962)
11 - The Chill (1964)
12 - The Far Side of the Dollar (1965)
13 - Black Money (1966)
14 - The Instant Enemy (1968)
15 - The Goodbye Look (1969)
16 - The Underground Man (1971)
17 - Sleeping Beauty (1973)
18 - Blue Hammer (May-1976)
The Name Is Archer (1955)

Book List in Order: 41 titles

  • The Dark Tunnel

    DEAD MAN’S CHOICE Doctor Robert Branch was a university professor, not a secret agent. But his best friend was dead and Branch knew that it couldn't have been suicide. He was also certain that the murder had been arranged by a Nazi espionage group...

  • Blue City

    TOWN GONE BAD When Johnny Weather got out of the Army he went home to Blue City and found his father murdered...The old man was the biggest wheel in town, but the cops filed his murder neatly in a pigeonhole marked "Unsolved." And when Johnny went t...

  • The Three Roads

    Silken skin pale against dark hair, red lips provocatively smiling at him -- that’s how Lieutenant Bret Taylor remembered Lorraine.  He was drunk when he married her, stone cold sober when he found her dead.  Out on the sunlit streets of ...

  • The Moving Target

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 1

    THE DISAPPEARANCE OF A BIG-MONEY MAN with Hollywood connections touched off a series of violent crimes. Oil millionaire Ralph Sampson was off again on another binge. The last time he was on one of those blinders he gave away an entire mountain, hunti...

  • The Drowning Pool

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 2

    "...I'd kill myself if I had my mother's courage. As it is, I suppose I'll sit around and wait for something to happen to me. Something good or something bad, it doesn't really matter." I didn't know what to say. I sett...

  • The Way Some People Die

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 3

    In a rundown house in Santa Monica, Mrs. Samuel Lawrence presses fifty crumpled bills into Lew Archer's hand and asks him to find her wandering daughter, Galatea. Following a trail that twists from Pacific Point to San Francisco and Palm Springs, Arc...

  • The Ivory Grin // Marked For Murder

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 4

    Bella City, California -- corrupt city on a plain. Through its hot, dusty dives, pawnshops, rooming houses, offices, in the poverty of its Black and Chicano streets, Lew Archer trails several dangerous misfits into the jaws, the ivory grin, of deat...

  • The Guilty Ones

    Lew Archer didn't like his client, J. Reginald Harlan, M.A. Of course Archer generally didn't like people whose names started with a single syllable. Harlan hired Lew to find his sister. A respectable school mistress that has run off with a bohemian ...

  • Meet Me at the Morgue

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy

    Four murders spurt technicolor blood over various pieces of gorgeous smog-kissed Southland real estate before Howard Cross, County Probation Officer, comes to the end of a heartbreaking road that began with the kidnapping of a four-year-old kid, a ra...



  • The Imaginary Blonde

    How do you pin a murder on a woman who doesn't exist?Lew Archer was in a dismal mood when he checked into a sleepy motel. He had just lost the man he was trailing and then got into a crazy highway chase with a Cadillac. Now he just wanted to get some...

  • Find a Victim

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 5

    There was a murder epidemic in Las Cruces and Lew Archer was making a habit of finding the victims. Catching the killer was a lot trickier. It might have been the cute little brunette who discovered something that gave her an even bigger bang than se...

  • The Name Is Archer

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery

    Someone's taken the big sleep at the Siesta Motel. There's a luscious blonde starlet who's pulled a vanishing act up in Santa Barbara. A genteel headmistress has found love's golden dream with a con artist. And who deposited the ice pick in the prett...

  • The Barbarous Coast

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 6

    WIFE TROUBLE She was blonde, beautiful and very definitely missing. Her anxious, hot-headed husband was making enemies all over Malibu looking for her. So he put Lew Archer on the job. Archer found her all right -- up to her pretty neck in a tangle ...

  • The Doomsters

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 7

    LEGACY OF DEATH Purissima was a little town pretty as a postcard. But the message it had for Lew Archer was written in blood with a black border around it. There was a lot of death in the town's richest and most powerful family. And there was also a...

  • The Galton Case

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 8

    The Galton Case looked clean-cut and routine to me in the beginning. I was wrong. The simple search for a missing heir had taken me across the country from pretty suburban homes to grim furnished rooms. I'd met people so corroded with hatred they wer...

  • Ferguson Affair

    The Ferguson Affair was a very tough case. There were a lot of corpses scattered around by the time Bill Gunnarson took it on -- and too few clues. The problem involved : A Nympho Movie Star -- An Alcoholic Millionaire -- Ambivalent Cops -- Assort...

  • The Wycherly Woman

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 9

    She was twenty-one, rich and beautiful. But her body was in San Francisco Bay. Archer searched from the seamy side of L.A. to the lowest of San Francisco's lower depths to find the bastard who'd dumped her there. He talked to innocent-eyed coeds, sha...

  • The Zebra-Striped Hearse

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 10

    THE DEADLIEST DISGUISE.... BURKE DAMIS was an arrogant artist/playboy who was just about to get his hooks into a half-million dollars in the beautiful form of a shapely heiress. BRUCE CAMPION was wanted for the nylon-stocking murder of his honey-hai...

  • The Chill

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 11

    Archer knew he shouldn't have taken the case, but Alex Kincaid seemed so desperate. Kincaid's loving new bride Dolly had just inexplicably walked out on him, leaving Kincaid more than a little fearful for her sanity -- and her safety. So Archer reluc...



  • The Far Side of the Dollar

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 12

    I’M THE MAN WOMEN CAN’T FORGET AND SOME MEN DON’T LIVE TO... That's me, Archer, the private eye educated in the Hollywood fleshpots who's forgotten more about murder than most cops ever learn . . . This time it's a missing boy driven by the ...

  • The Sleeping Dog

    in Canine Crimes II

    Thirteen timeless classics of mystery -- all featuring unforgettable dog heroes -- are together for the very first time in Canine Crimes II. Culled from the pages of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, these often...

  • Black Money

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 13

    A FATE WORSE THAN LIFE Lew Archer made a deal with fat little Rich Boy at the posh Montevista Tennis Club. Seems Rich Boy had lost his beautiful fiancée to a stranger with a suspiciously phony French accent. So Rich Boy hired Archer to retrieve the...

  • The Instant Enemy

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 14

    Sandy Sebastian was only a kid -- a lost, lonely, unhappy young girl who ran away with another equally lost kid called Davy Spanner. One was a homicidal killer. Both were kidnappers, and Lew Archer was hired to stop them before anyone got hurt. Arche...

  • The Goodbye Look

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 15

    In searching for a gun used to commit two murders fifteen years apart, Lew Archer is introduced to California hobos and the nouveau riche in his attempt to solve the murder of another private eye. Reprint. NYT....

  • The Underground Man

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 16

    As a mysterious fire rages through the hills above a privileged town in Southern California, Archer tracks a missing child who may be the pawn in a marital struggle or the victim of a bizarre kidnapping.  What he uncovers amid the ashe...

  • Sleeping Beauty

    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Archer Mystery - 17

    AN OFFSHORE OIL SLICK ... A $100,000 RANSOM NOTE ... AND A LETHAL DOSE OF NEMBUTAL ... ...

  • Blue Hammer

    A Lew Archer Mystery - 18

    "FIND THE PAINTING, MR. ARCHER." Archer had more experience with missing persons than paintings, but the case seemed simple enough. Until the trail was bloodied by one murder after another. And Archer shifted his sights from an art thief to an artfu...

  • Archer in Jeopardy

  • Trouble Follows Me

    In the last days of World War II, a sailor discovers a transcontinental conspiracy in this classic from “the greatest mystery novelist of his age” (John Connolly, author of Every Dead Thing).
     It is February 1945, and th...



  • Lew Archer, Private Investigator

  • Inward Journey

  • Lew Archer, Private Investigator II

  • Self-Portrait Ceaselessly into the Past

  • Strangers in Town

    Macdonald fans will hail Strangers in Town: Three Newly Discovered Mysteries by Ross Macdonald, edited by his biographer, Tom Nolan. The first story, Death by Water, stars Macdonald's first detective, Joe Rogers, while two novelettes, Strangers in To...

  • Achoo! Bang! Crash! The Noisy Alphabet

    A for . . . Achoo?B for Bump, Bang, and Bop?C for Crackle, Clank, and Crunch?This is truly an alphabet with attitude, created by that master of raucous humor, Ross MacDonald. In this hilarious book you'll see clothes ripped off an intrepid game hunte...

  • Another Perfect Day

    Life is Rich, sighed Jack, as he settled back in his job as Chief Flavor Tester for the World's Best Ice Cream Company. This is turning out to be my most perfect day yet!But just when he thought things couldn't possibly get any better, they started t...

  • Bad Baby

    Jack was having another perfect day. In fact, you could say that his whole life was perfect, except that he wanted someone to share it with. That someone arrives in the form of a new baby sister who keeps growing...and growing...until she's about ten...

  • Midnight Blue

    Lew Archer was out for a little target practice. Just a deserted old estate in the canyon where Archer could get away from the Hollywood rat race and sharpen his shooting skills down in the meadow. But he found two things there he wasn’t expecting....

  • Henry's Hand

    Henry’s Hand is a story about the friendship between Henry, a giant, and his right hand. You see, Henry sometimes has trouble keeping track of his body parts -- everything from his ears to one of his legs can fall off. Once, his eye even rolled un...



  • The Archer Files

    No matter what cases private eye Lew Archer takes on -- a burglary, a runaway, or a disappeared person -- the trail always leads to tangled family secrets and murder. Widely considered the heir to Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, Archer dug up secrets a...

  • The Bearded Lady

    In this short story from Ross Macdonald’s The Archer Files, detective Lew Archer stops in town to look in on an old army buddy, an artist, only to find that he has mysteriously disappeared. Seemingly the only clue is a disturbing charcoal sketch of...

Award-Winning Books by Ross MacDonald

The Zebra-Striped Hearse
2002 Audies -- Audiobook/Adapted


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Ross MacDonald has published 41 books.

Ross MacDonald does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, The Bearded Lady, was published in October 2021.

The first book by Ross MacDonald, The Dark Tunnel, was published in January 1944.

Yes. Ross MacDonald has 1 series.
Pseudonyms / Co-Author
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