In 1949 Kenneth Millar, then writing as John Macdonald, published his first novel featuring private detective Lew Archer, inaugurating what The New York Times would call “the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.” By the early 1960s Millar’s nom de plume had changed and the series had evolved steadily toward new levels of emotional depth and structural ingenuity. The name Ross Macdonald had become a byword for a new standard in crime fiction.

The three novels collected in this volume represent for many readers the summit of Macdonald’s art. They remain thrilling for their searing psychological truth-telling, daring flights of narrative invention, and their keenly observed picture of the manners and morals of a particular time and place (Southern California in the early 1960s). The intricate carpentry of their plotting is matched by their passion and imaginative sweep.

Each of these books reflects Macdonald’s enduring concern with the hidden crimes and agonizing dysfunctions that haunt families from one generation to the next. In The Zebra-Striped Hearse, a father’s attempt to protect his daughter from “the complete and utter personal disaster” of marriage to a troubled drifter sends Archer on a perplexing and increasingly bloody trail that leads him from Mexico to Lake Tahoe and finally into the maze of a tragically splintered identity.

In The Chill, perhaps Macdonald’s most perfectly accomplished novel, the search for a young bride gone missing uncovers a succession of seemingly unrelated crimes committed over a period of decades, as Archer finds himself “a ghost from the present haunting a bloody moment in the past.” Macdonald relentlessly strips away his characters’ denials and delusions to reveal a core of violently twisted emotion.

Another hunt for a missing person—this time a young man escaped from an elite reform school—provides the impetus for The Far Side of the Dollar, which Macdonald’s friend Eudora Welty considered “securely among your strongest and best ones . . . a beauty that just gets better.” The book’s cunningly constructed puzzles work intricate variations on the bonds between parent and child, uncovering multiple layers of deception and distortion along the way to the stunning revelations: “Everything is connected with everything else. The problem is to find the connections.”