Ross Macdonald was the pseudonym for Kenneth Millar, author of over thirty novels including a series that featured Lew Archer, private detective extraordinaire. His novels included recurrent themes of rootlessness, abandoned children, deficient parents, and family secrets denied, for which he drew heavily from his own life spent shuttling between Canada and California. 
 

"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."

– Ross Macdonald, Blue City