Running after Ross Macdonald novels after washing hands …. haen?!

And this is what was actually happening … Ross Macdonald ke novels ke peeche haath dhokay pad gaya tha … why one needs to wash one’s hands before running after someone or something I don’t know.  Three years ago was when Vinod first introduced me to Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels, and I used to buy and read Ross Macdonald's Archer novels as and when I found them in secondhand book stores.  This was especially after I realized that buying new editions of Lew Archer novels was an expensive proposition and also that not all novels were easily available.  So, finding and reading an Archer novel was a rare pleasure in itself.  After some time, impatience got the better of me as I finished reading the novels one by one and I also became greedy, and threw caution to the winds.  I wanted to finish the series and spent quite a sum six months ago and bought 5 Archer novels in one go from a used books portal on Amazon. 

Sometime in March this year, I bought my first non-Archer novel, Trouble Follows Me.  I was not searching for it … I happened to see it on another secondhand site while searching Ross Macdonald books … the price was good and I thought why not.  Trouble Follows Me is one of the four non-Archer novels that Ross Macdonald wrote under his real name, Kenneth Millar (they are also sometimes reissued under the more familiar ‘Ross Macdonald’ name).  This is one of the two novels that features Chet Gordon, the other being The Dark Tunnel.  He wrote two more non-Archer novels, one under the name John Ross Macdonald and another under his more familiar pen name, Ross Macdonald.  Now that there were only four more Archer novels to read and complete the set, Trouble Follows Me set off a new chase.   I located three such novels in one portal along with two Archer novels.  For some reason, they couldn’t send Blue City.  These four novels came in after a couple of weeks.  Meet me at the Morgue was written as John Ross Macdonald and The Three Roads was written as Kenneth Millar.  All this happened in April.  Only two more Archer novels remained to be bought and read after these two came in … and what a book one of them turned out to be … till then, these are the covers.