Ross Macdonald (1915-1983) was the author of eighteen books that a New York Times critic called "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American": the Lew Archer canon, which included such breakthrough best-sellers as The Underground Man, The Goodbye Look, and The Blue Hammer. Macdonald (born Kenneth Millar) also wrote several novelettes and short-stories involving Southern California private-detective Lew Archer. The Archer Files for the first time collects all the brief Archer fiction: the stories from Macdonald's 1955 paperback-original The Name Is Archer, the additional tales included in the Otto Penzler-edited 1977 volume Lew Archer: Private Investigator, and the three then-unknown novellas presented in Crippen & Landru's 2001 book Strangers in Town. Also included in The Archer Files are several lengthy, never-before-published fragments of unfinished Macdonald stories: "case notes," as it were, from the files of Lew Archer.
