Although crime novelist Ross Macdonald was born in Northern California in 1915, he was heavily influenced by the time he spent north of the 49th. Macdonald (real name: Kenneth Millar) spent his childhood in Vancouver, and his youth in Winnipeg and Kitchener. His parents were Canadian, as was his wife Margaret Millar, who wrote detective fiction for almost as long as he did, and almost as well. But the man whose books are forever associated with the rotting spoils of Kennedy-era California – Macdonald and Millar lived in Santa Barbara for the better part of their careers – remained wholly Canadian in spirit.

Macdonald never lost the thoughtfulness and moral thrift of his Upper Canada adolescence. Each of his 20-odd novels concerned the persistence of the past, and the ways in which old sins and buried lies reach out to touch – and to disturb – the affluent suburbs of postwar America. Late in life, Macdonald wrote, “Canada seems to hang like a glacier slowly moving down on me from its notch … I expect it to overtake me before I die, reminding me with its chill and weight that I belong to the north after all.”

As Tom Nolan’s biography makes clear, Macdonald remains the successor to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and the precursor to James Ellroy. One of the few genuinely dark talents of the genre, Macdonald was the first to get away from the pulp fundamentals of the private detective – “fists flying, guns blazing, blonde bombshell perched on the edge of his desk,” as Nolan says – and turn to the bleak hunting grounds of American dysfunction. Macdonald’s hero Lew Archer was summoned not to gin joints and waterfronts but to country clubs, cocktail parties, and the houses of the nouveau riche, alcoholic PTA moms, and guilty, too-busy dads. Long before we had names for now-familiar pathologies, and before so-called important American novelists were addressing the same issues – throwaway kids, spoiled cities, yuppie anomie – Macdonald was giving these topics a brilliant narrative spin.

Nolan has written a good book about an important writer. He’s especially thorough on the myriad sadnesses in Macdonald’s life: a grim childhood that very nearly derailed him; a disconsolate daughter who died too young; and the crumbling of a fine intellect from early Alzheimer’s. There are occasional fumbles and a forgivable tendency to overdramatize, but anyone who prizes Macdonald’s deft, untrammelled style, bruised characters, and sunshine-glazed milieu will come away exhilarated, and deeply affected by the writer who never got to finish his last work, a novel about Winnipeg in the 1920s: “It will be about frigidity, I think … deep, concealing snow.”