He used McDonald and Macdonald.

Ross Macdonald was the main pseudonym used by the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar.

He was an influential author in the  hard-boiled literary genre. The typical protagonist is a detective. Women are dames. Dialogue is smart ass.

He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in Southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer. …

He has been called the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries.

Macdonald’s writing built on the pithy style of his predecessors by adding psychological depth and insights into the motivations of his characters. …

Gradually he swapped the hard-boiled trappings for more subjective themes: personal identity, the family secret, the family scapegoat, the childhood trauma; how men and women need and battle each other, how the buried past rises like a skeleton to confront the present.  …

In The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962), Archer hunts a missing girl who may be dead, possibly murdered.

His path repeatedly crosses a group of young surfers who own a hearse painted in gay zebra stripes. To the youngsters, death is remote and funny. To the world-weary detective, it’s close and grim.

For a book written in the 60s, I found it surprisingly smart. The themes would be contemporary today.

In fact, I would not call it much dated — though women are an inferior species. 😀