About Ross MacDonald: David Ross MacDonald is a Canadian sailor. He began sailing at the age of 11.
I had reached the point when I could not see anything clearly ahead, I needed help, and I got it.
I knew how it was with drunks. They ran out of generosity, even for themselves.
My half-suppressed Canadian years, my whole childhood and youth, rose like a corpse from the bottom of the sea to confront me.
The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.
The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.
There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns - different states, if possible - and write each other letters once a year.
On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.
I found when I followed the driveway around to the back that behind its imposing front it was just another tract house, as if the architect had tried to combine a southern plantation mansion with the slave quarters.
The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.
When there's trouble in a family, it tends to show up in the weakest member. And all the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble.
As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him, the women he likes are getting older too. The trouble is that most of them are married.
How can a man help breaking the law when he don't have money to live on?
I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.
We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet conc...
