The Archer Files

SIGNED, LIMITED (400 COPIES) HARDBACK, signed by the editor, facsimile of author signature, and extra pamphlet with an unpublished chapter for a novel. 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 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 lengthy, never-before-published fragments of unfinished Macdonald stories: case notes, as it were, from the files of Lew Archer. Edited by Macdonald biographer Tom Nolan, The Archer Files& is prefaced with Nolan's biographical sketch of Lew Archer himself -- the character Eudora Welty described as a distinguished creation ... As a detective and as a man he takes the human situation with full seriousness. Jeff Wong s cover is adapted from the 1955 paperback original, but depicting Ross Macdonald rather than Lew Archer.