Re. Raymond Chandler AND Ross MacDonald

[Robin Landseadel]

	. . . Macdonald once wrote of his famous creation that he was
	"so narrow that when he turns sideways he almost disappears".
	The thinness was deliberate because Macdonald wanted his
	detective to be like a therapist, a man whose actions "are
	largely directed to putting together the stories of other people's
	lives and discovering their significance. He is ... a
	consciousness in which the meanings of other lives emerge." 	
	Macdonald was always insistent that Archer wasn't the centre of
	the story. "The detective," he once advised an aspiring writer,
	"isn't your main character, and neither is your villain. The main
	character is the corpse. The detective's job is to seek justice for
	the corpse. It's the corpse's story, first and foremost."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/01/ross-macdonald-crime-novels