False Lead: A Memoir of Ross Macdonald

Ross Macdonald--the pen name of Kenneth Millar--is widely considered one of the greatest crime novelists of all time. His Lew Archer series, which ran for nearly thirty years from the 1950s into the 1980s, broke new ground and influenced many of today's best mystery writers. In 1980, I went to California, wanting to meet Macdonald (and secretly hoping he would take me under his wing). Things did not quite work out that way, as you'll read in this memoir, written three years later when he died of Alzheimer's disease.