Using insight gained from his own experience as a detective fiction writer, Schopen analyzes each of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels in chronological order. He devotes individual chapters to The Doomsters (1958) and The Underground Man (1971), both of which he contends mark turning points in Macdonald's career. Beginning with a chapter defining and assessing the hardboiled detective genre, he demonstrates how the award-winning author's fiction evolved to a literate and adult form on a par with the best American literature and shows how Macdonald raised the genre to a new level of artistic excellence.