Recommended reading - The Moving Target / aka Harper (1949):

The Moving Target / aka Harper (1949).

By Ross MacDonald.

ISBN-10: 037570146X

ISBN-13: 978-0375701467

Back cover description:

CRIME FICTION

“Ross Macdonald remains the grandmaster, taking the crime novel to new heights by imbuing it with psychological resonance, complexity of story, and richness of style that remain awe-inspiring. Those of us in his wake owe a debt that can never be paid. – Jonathan Kellerman.

Like many Southern California millionaires, Ralph Sampson keeps odd company. There's the sun-worshipping holy man whom Sampson once gave his very own mountain; the fading actress with sidelines in astrology and S&M. Now one of Sampson's friends may have arranged his kidnapping. And as Lew Archer follows the clues from the canyon sanctuaries of the megarich to jazz joints where you get beaten up between sets, The Moving Target blends sex, greed, and family hatred into an explosively readable crime novel.

“Macdonald is one of a handful of writers in the [mystery] genre whose worth and quality surpass the limitations of the form.” – Los Angeles Times.

If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it was Ross Macdonald. Between the later 1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity that his predecessors had only hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, Macdonald redefined the private eye as a roving conscience whop walks the treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin.

VINTAGE CRIME / BLACK LIZARD