The Underground Man

The Underground Man is a detective novel of merciless suspense and tragic depth, with an unfaltering insight into the moral ambiguities at the heart of California's version of the American dream.

"There are certain books that bide their time, like plants, waiting decades to flower.... If a copy of The Underground Man, a novel from 1971, by Ross Macdonald, has been sitting on your shelf for ages, unread and barely noticed, try opening it now. Suddenly it's a book in full bloom." —Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

As a mysterious fire rages through the hills above a privileged town in Southern California, Lew 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 ashes is murder—and a trail of motives as combustible as gasoline.

If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, it was Ross Macdonald. Between the late 1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity that his predecessors had only hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, Macdonald redefined the private eye as a roving conscience who walks the treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin."There are certain books that bide their time, like plants, waiting decades to flower.... If a copy of The Underground Man, a novel from 1971, by Ross Macdonald, has been sitting on your shelf for ages, unread and barely noticed, try opening it now. Suddenly it's a book in full bloom." —Anthony Lane, The New Yorker


"A more serious and complex writer than Chandler and Hammett ever were."
—Eudora Welty

"Ross Macdonald is an important American novelist!"
—San Francisco Chronicle

"I should like to venture that Ross Macdonald is a better novelist than either...Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler."
—Anthony Boucher, The New York Times Book ReviewRoss Macdonald's real name was Kenneth Millar.  Born near San Francisco in 1915 and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, Millar returned to the U.S. as a young man and published his first novel in 1944.  He served as the President of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award, as well as the Mystery Writers of Great Britain's Silver Dagger Award.  He died in 1983.