Kreyling moves beyond the usual critical focus on the internal structure of the works—the disclosure and hiding of clues, for example—to provide a fuller assessment of why Macdonald’s writings deserve the same critical attention afforded serious novels. He considers the "mutual bond" of structure and life that informs Macdonald’s work, the Freudian theories he adopted to advance his genre, and the place his novels occupy in the larger literary canon.
Illumining the ways in which Macdonald’s writing engages reality, Kreyling stresses the importance of reading Macdonald in his time. He looks with particular interest at the life of Ken Millar, the man who adopted the pen name Ross Macdonald, and relates the author’s experiences to the storylines surrounding hard-boiled detective Lew Archer. Kreyling shows that instead of presenting a static protagonist, Macdonald forces Archer to mature and change by incorporating themes drawn from the travails of the novelist’s own family life, the social and moral upheavals of the 1960s, America’s and California’s obsession with race, environmental sins associated with unreflective development, and the difficulties of aging
