ATD & Raymond Chandler

[Mike Weaver]

Lew Basnight:
Personally I can't help but wonder about Luba's Knight ( or Luba's 
night) as in the formidable femme of Gilberto Hernandez' Love and 
Rockets series. La Vida Locas got a mention in Vineland...

The Lew Archer reference is a must. Ross Macdonald said of his 
character if you turned him sideways he'd disappear. The books work 
by Lew asking questions and then more questions and the focal 
characters of  each drama gradually reveal the entanglements and 
agonies of the past which have produced the current situation that 
Lew has been called upon to resolve.

A quick look on the web just led me to this.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/11/02/the_last_testament_of_ross_macdonald/

>"My concern," Macdonald said in 1971, "is to tell the story of 
>others. So I've deprived Archer of a private life." Over the years 
>Archer became, in Macdonald's words, "almost pathologically selfless."
What better description of Pynchon?

Got there from
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/archer.html

Mike (who used to collect Ross Macdonald paperbacks with an eye to 
the most inappropriate covers - he was in that respect the Kilgore 
Trout of crime fiction)