Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer is as close to the quintessential American private detective of America in the 1960s as it is possible to get. Although his adventures began in 1949 and did not toll their final peal until 1976, his attitude and personality reflected a combination of California hipness and hippie-ness that could have existed nowhere else, nor at any other time.

While Archer started out as a tough guy with idealism in his bones, he slowly morphed into a tough guy whose idealism took a turn into the kind of sympathetic understanding and forgiveness that one is more likely to associate with a man of the cloth than of a former cop whose job is to identify and locate people who have killed other people.

I cannot think of many authors I admire more than Kenneth Millar, who used the Ross Macdonald pseudonym for most of the Archer novels and stories. He had been writing under his own name, but his wife, Margaret Millar, was having more success as a mystery writer so he decided to dabble inthe genre himself. He used the pseudonym John Macdonald for the first Archer novel, “The Moving Target” (1949). Then, as a pulp writer named John D. MacDonald began to be noticed, he switched to John Ross Macdonald for the next five novels, finally dropping the “John” for good in 1956.

Stylistically, he emulated his literary hero, Raymond Chandler, and did it beautifully. He claimed that he owed a great debt to Dashiell Hammett, too, but I have never seen evidence of this, except in the sense that every American writer of hard-boiled private eye stories does. It was not until the mid-’60s that Macdonald found his own voice, though Chandler whispered in the shadows until the day he died.

A new complete collection of Archer’s stories, “The Archer Files” (Crippen & Landru Publishers, 349 pages, $25), together with a group of previously unpublished notes, has just been released, and it is a major publishing event — even if it is from a small independent house.

The idea of “notes” is not very enticing to anyone but a dedicated scholar or fanatic, but these are both fascinating and frustrating because they are actually the beginnings of stories (or possibly novels) that were never written. The prose is as perceptive and polished as it is for any of the published works, and any aficionado of this wonderful writer will want to weep or scream when they end so abruptly.

The other part of books such as this that readers often skip is the introduction, but to do so in this case would be like skipping the pecan pie to have another carrot stick. Tom Nolan, who wrote the definitive Macdonald biography, has shown off his unassailable expertise with a 22-page biographical sketch of Archer that achieves what such pieces rarely do: It forces you to start reading the stories.

Loving the author and his prose style, which is more exquisitely rendered than that which most poets have ever produced, does not, however, make me entirely love the character.

It is impossible not to admire Archer’s courage, and his ethics, but as an old romantic myself (it’s a curse, if you want to know the truth, but inescapable), I am a bit put off by his statement that “I began as a romantic but ended up a realist.”

Worse, I despise the notion with which he successfully attempts to forgive a killer. His compassion allows that, yes, the killer was to blame, but so was everyone involved in the case. “We were all guilty,” Archer says. “We had to learn to live with it.” Even in context (read “The Doomsters,” his 1958 novel), this is poppycock that points to a present day where no one is forced to take responsibility for his own actions. If you want evidence, Al Sharpton frequently appears on “The O’Reilly Factor” as the voice of reason, saying people should be regarded as innocent until proven guilty, evidently forgetting his own leap to judgment in the Tawana Brawley case — for which this blowhard has still never apologized.

Okay, now that that is off my chest, let me go back to praising the author and his books, none more so than “The Archer Files,” which should be on the shelf of everyone who likes detective fiction and, even more important, everyone who likes serious American literature.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at otto penzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.