Macdonald, Ross (1915–1983)

US writer. He is credited with turning the detective novel genre into a literary form, with a series of books featuring the hardboiled detective Lew Archer. Millar won many awards for such work as The Wycherly Woman (1961), The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962), and The Chill (1964).

He was born in Los Gatos, California. He studied at the University of Western Ontario, the University of Toronto, and the University of Michigan, gaining his PhD in 1951. He taught history and English at the Kitchener Collegiate Institute in Ontario, Canada (1939–41), and at the University of Michigan (1942–44; 1948–49). From 1945 he lived in Santa Barbara, California.