thrillingdetective: Kinsey Millhone
Kinsey's turf is the sun-blinded streets of southern California's Santa Teresa (actually Santa Barbara, the same streets Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer prowled). ah in R is for Ricochet, the blurb I noticed must've been about Macdonal - yes:

Grafton has cited the late great Ross MacDonald, creator of the sun-drenched-noir Lew Archer novels, as an influence. Twenty years into Kinsey's run, she's become his rightful heir. -Entertainment Weekly

thrillingdetective: Lew Archer:
The greatest P.I. series written? Probably. LEW ARCHER stands with the Continental Op, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe as one of the few P.I's who actually define the genre. What makes Archer unique among this group is not just the fact that the books are a sustained narrative spanning three decades, but that they also made the genre relevant to a changing society. Where Hammett revolutionised crime writing and Chandler romanticised it (Macdonald called his predecessor a "slumming angel"), Macdonald by his own account "gradually siphoned off the aura of romance and made room for a complete social realism." Lew Archer made possible all who followed.

thrillingdetective: Authors and Creators: Ross Macdonald:

"No once since Macdonald has written with such poetic inevitability about people, their secret cares, their emotional scars, their sadness, cowardice, and courage. He reminded the rest of us of what was possible in our genre." -John Lutz, in January Magazine

Kenneth Millar, under the pen name of Ross Macdonald, arguably forms the third point of what is now considered the Holy Trinity of hardboiled detective fiction, the other points being, of course, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and is, to many, the most critically and academically respected of the three. wow.
Although born in Los Gatos, California, December 13th, 1915, he was raised and educated in Canada by his mother, a never particularly healthy woman, and a succession of relatives, after she and his father, a sometime sailor-poet-writer, separated. 'I counted the number of rooms I had lived in during my first sixteen years, and got a total of fifty,' he has written. This rootlessness, and the hole left by an absent parent, was to become a recurring motif in Millar's fiction.