as the detective "Lew Harper". In addition, The Underground Man was adapted as a TV movie in 1974. Tom Nolan in his Ross Macdonald, A Biography, wrote, "By any standard he was remarkable. His first books, patterned on Hammett and Chandler, were at once vivid chronicles of a postwar California and elaborate retellings of Greek and other classic myths. Gradually he swapped the hard-boiled trappings for more subjective themes: personal identity, the family secret, the family scapegoat, the childhood trauma; how men and women need and battle each other, how the buried past rises like a skeleton to confront the present. He brought the tragic drama of Freud and the psychology of Sophocles to detective stories, and his prose flashed with poetic imagery." In a 2017 book review, the Wall Street Journal provided this summary of the author's style:"... it is the sheer beauty of Macdonald’s laconic style—with its seductive rhythms and elegant plainness—that holds us spellbound. 'Hard-boiled,' 'noir,' 'mystery,' it doesn’t matter what you call it. Macdonald, with insolent grace, blows past the barrier constructed by Dorothy Sayers between “the literature of escape” and “the literature of expression.” These novels, triumphs of his literary alchemy, dare to be both." Recognition According to the New York Times, "some critics ranked him among the best American novelists of his generation." William Goldman of the newspaper's Book Review section wrote that the Archer books were "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American". Over his career, Macdonald was presented with several awards. In 1964, the Mystery Writers of America awarded the author the Silver Dagger award for "The Chill." Ten years later, he received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and in 1982 he received "The Eye," the Lifetime Achievement Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. In 1982, he was awarded the Robert Kirsch Award by the Los Angeles Times for "an outstanding body of work by an author from the West or featuring the West." Bibliography Writing as Kenneth Millar The Dark Tunnel (a.k.a. I Die Slowly) – 1944 Trouble Follows Me (a.k.a. Night Train) – 1946 Blue City – 1947 (filmed with Judd Nelson as Blue City, 1986) The Three Roads – 1948 (filmed with Michael Sarrazin as Deadly Companion, 1980) These first four novels, all non-series standalones, were initially published using Millar's real name, but have since been intermittently