Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

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  For my father

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  INTRODUCTION

  by Sue Grafton

  The contrast between Ken Millar the man, Ross Macdonald the novelist, and Lew Archer the fictional private detective is one that will doubtless fascinate scholars and psychologists for years to come. What Tom Nolan accomplishes in this meticulous biography is to detail the connections between Ken Millar’s personal odyssey and his professional pursuits. Fair-minded, evenhanded, Tom Nolan’s account of the life of Ken Millar gives depth and dimension to a man who tended to say little about himself. This biography provides the basis for a renewed appreciation of the man and his achievement. Ken Millar’s struggle for success, the pleasure he took in the trajectory of his career, and the complexities of his marriage to mystery writer Margaret Millar are related with a balance and a grace of which Millar himself would have approved.

  Nolan has the confidence to let Millar’s life stand without speculation, though the darker aspects of the writer’s history must have provided a powerful temptation. From Millar’s troubled adolescence to his only daughter’s clashes with the law, Nolan locates Millar’s work within the context of his life and allows these events to speak for themselves.

  I was privileged to meet Kenneth Millar twice here in Santa Barbara. This was sometime in the late sixties, long before my career as a mystery writer was launched. Introduced by mutual acquaintances, we did no more than shake hands in passing. I was, at that point, a lowly creative-writing student in an adult-education class, and he had already achieved near legendary status. Even as an avid reader of his work, I knew little of the man. I would love to report that he made some cogent comment that shaped my aspirations and gave impetus to my ambition. Alas, he did not, though his unwitting influence on my career was profound. One gathers that Ken Millar wasn’t often given to casual or hasty comment, though he afforded other writers his unfailing support. He was, by all reports, a man of intelligence and reserve, whose observations about writing were neither haplessly assembled nor carelessly disseminated. Quiet, courtly, and unprepossessing, Millar was the quintessential intellectual in a genre formerly reserved for men of more flamboyant style and more inflammatory imagination.

  Ken Millar was intrigued by the hard-boiled detective genre. Taking the reins from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, he handled the form with mounting confidence. Where Hammett and Chandler wrote only a scant few novels each (five in Hammett’s case, seven in Chandler’s), Ross Macdonald’s eighteen Lew Archer novels were written over a span of some twenty-five years, allowing the writer a narrative range and breadth in which to hone his skills. Millar incorporated into the Lew Archer novels his own maturing worldview and thus imbued the series with a melancholy, hard-won wisdom.

  More poetic than Hammett, less cynical than Chandler, what Ross Macdonald demonstrated many times over was that the hard-boiled detective novel was no longer the exclusive domain of the whiskey-drinking gumshoe, fists flying, guns blazing, blonde bombshell perched on the edge of his desk. Like his creator, Lew Archer was a man with a finely honed sensibility, whose passion for fairness permeated everything he did.

  From Ross Macdonald, we learned to see southern California as we’d never seen it before. From him, we finally understood that the crime novel could be as challenging, as astute, and as rarefied as the sonnet . . . precise, perceptive, and passionate . . . even while its fundamental subject matter remained rooted in crime and violent death. If Dashiell Hammett can be said to have injected the hard-boiled detective novel with its primitive force, and Raymond Chandler gave shape to its prevailing tone, it was Ken Millar, writing as Ross Macdonald, who gave the genre its current respectability, generating a worldwide readership that has paved the way for those of us following in his footsteps.

  Sue Grafton

  Santa Barbara, California

  July 28, 1998

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  Ten years ago, while nobody was watching—or, rather, while everyone was looking in the wrong direction—a writer of detective stories turned into a major American novelist.

  —John Leonard, The New York Times Book Review

  . . . the Archer books, the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.

  —William Goldman, The New York Times Book Review

  In 1969, when most literate readers thought detective stories beneath consideration and mystery fiction rarely appeared on best-seller lists, a handful of New York journalists conspired to push a California writer of private-eye novels to the front rank of American letters.

  The writer was Ross Macdonald, a mystery novelist who didn’t so much transcend the genre as elevate it, showing again (like Hammett, Faulkner, Collins, Dickens, Greene, and many others since Poe) how the crime story can at any time become art.

  The conspiracy worked.

  Front-page celebrations in the New York Times Book Review and a cover story in Newsweek turned Ross Macdonald’s books about detective Lew Archer into national best-sellers. Movies and a television series were made. Millions of Macdonald’s books were sold. After twenty years in the mystery field, Ross Macdonald was an overnight success.

  The world at large discovered a writer already well known to mystery fans. Crime-fiction reviewers had long hailed Macdonald as the hard-boiled successor to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. His influence on a generation of mystery writers was profound. In such classic works as The Doomsters, The Galton Case, The Chill, Black Money, The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty, Macdonald opened fresh thematic territory and set a new literary standard for his genre. Vital trends in modern crime fiction drew impetus from Macdonald’s work. Writers as diverse as Sara Paretsky, Jonathan Kellerman, Jerome Charyn, and James Ellroy have called Macdonald an influence. Simply as a bestselling mystery author he broke ground; his success, before a time when genre authors routinely became household names, showed the way for the future Parkers, Graftons, Hillermans, Cornwells, and Mosleys.

  Ross Macdonald’s appeal and importance extended beyond the mystery field. He was seen as an important California author, a novelist who evoked his region as tellingly as such mainstream writers as Nathanael West and Joan Didion. Before he died, Macdonald was given the Los Angeles Times’s Robert Kirsch Award for a distinguished body of work about the West. Some critics ranked him among the best American novelists of his generation.

  By any standard he was remarkable. His first books, patterned on Hammett and Chandler, were at once vivid chronicles of a postwar California and elaborate retellings of Greek and other classic myths. 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. He brought the tragic drama of Freud and the psychology of Sophocles to detective stories, and his prose flashed with poetic imagery. By the time of his commercial breakthrough, some of Macdonald’s concerns (the breakdown between generations, the fragility of moral and global ecologies) held special resonance for a country divided by an unpopular war and alarmed for the environment. His vision was strong enough to spill into real life, where a news story or a friend’s revelation could prompt the comment “Just like a Ross Macdonald novel.”

  It was a vision wi
th meaning for all sorts of readers. Macdonald got fan mail from soldiers, professors, teenagers, movie directors, ministers, housewives, poets. He was claimed as a colleague by good writers around the world, including Eudora Welty, Andrey Voznesensky, Elizabeth Bowen, Thomas Berger, Marshall McLuhan, Margaret Laurence, Osvaldo Soriano, Hugh Kenner, Nelson Algren, Donald Davie, and Reynolds Price.

  When he died in 1983, Ross Macdonald was the best-known and most highly regarded crime-fiction writer in America. But (despite dozens of articles, two documentary films, and two critical studies) not much was known about the author of “the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.”

  It was no secret Ross Macdonald was the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar, a Santa Barbara man married to another good mystery writer, Margaret Millar. But his official biography was spare: born in northern California of Canadian parents, raised in Ontario and other provinces, he earned a doctorate at Michigan, served in the U.S. Navy, and moved with wife and daughter to California in 1946. In a handful of autobiographical essays, Millar seemed to conceal as much as he told.

  Hiding things came second nature, to protect himself and spare his family. Like the people in his fiction, Millar had secrets, and he persuaded sympathetic journalists to collaborate in keeping them.

  Yet he believed in the writing of candid biography and expected to be its subject. He valued works that made connections between a novelist’s life and his fiction. Millar preserved much material that proved helpful in explicating the books of Ross Macdonald, who admitted he was one of those authors who strew their novels with personal clues, “like burglars who secretly wish to be caught.” Among the revealing documents Millar left future literary detectives were a candid notebook memoir, an unpublished autobiographical novel, and thirty years’ correspondence.

  Now—after the deaths of his widow, their only child, and their only grandchild; after unrestricted examination of the Kenneth and Margaret Millar Papers at the University of California, Irvine, as well as other archives’ material; and after hundreds of interviews with those who knew Millar—a fuller picture emerges of this admired American writer.

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  Ross Macdonald came to crime writing honestly. Virtually fatherless and growing up poor, Kenneth Millar broke social and moral laws: having sex from the age of eight, getting drunk at twelve, fighting violently, stealing. “I’m amazed at some of the chances I took as a boy,” he admitted. Worse than the things he did were those he imagined. Mad at the world and at his lot in life, he sometimes felt angry enough to kill. As a youngster he read Poe and Hawthorne and Dostoyevsky: writers who wrestled with the good and the bad angels he too was assaulted by. When he wrote his own mystery stories, Millar saw himself in his tales’ wrongdoers. “I don’t have to be violent,” he said, “my books are.”

  By his own reckoning, he barely escaped being a criminal. When he stopped breaking laws before starting college, he fashioned a code of conduct for himself (and others) as unyielding as the formal religious creeds he had rejected. Millar put himself in a behavioral box as if his life or mental health depended on it, though his psyche often strained against the box’s walls. He stayed over forty years in an often rancorous marriage, putting its tensions to use as he turned his wife and himself into published authors. He stayed in the box of detective fiction, determined to provide for his family and avoid the failures of his irresponsible father.

  “The Split Man” was a title Macdonald often played with. Millar himself was a man split along national, cultural, intellectual, professional, and even sexual fault lines. Born in California, raised in Canada, as a young man he thought of moving to England. All his life he felt on the wrong side of whatever border he’d most recently crossed. The roots of Macdonald’s tales of troubled families in a corrupted California lay in Millar’s bleak Ontario childhood with its “long conspiracies of silent pain.”

  The man who created the hard-boiled Lew Archer was one of the most brilliant graduate students in the history of the University of Michigan. While Macdonald’s private-eye stories were being published in Manhunt magazine next to Mickey Spillane’s (which he detested), Millar was writing a Ph.D. dissertation on the psychological criticism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His academic colleagues disparaged or despaired of his detective fiction; his fellow crime writers were puzzled or intimidated by his university work.

  In the sunshine of Santa Barbara, California, Kenneth Millar dressed like a Midwesterner and spoke with a Scots-Canadian accent. In the wealthy heart of Nixon and Reagan country, he was a Stevensonian Democrat; even as a beach-club member, he still felt like an underdog.

  He was a gentle man with a frightening temper, an intellectual who went to murder trials, a person of great pride and startling humility. Once or twice he nearly broke under his complexities. Like Oedipus (a recurring archetype in Macdonald’s fiction and Millar’s psyche), he seemed to bring about the tragedies he tried to avoid. Determined to be the good parent his own were not, Millar fathered an only child whose life was scarred by emotional and legal trauma. Obsessed with not causing fatal harm, he saw his daughter become entangled in the sort of headline-making events he’d always dreaded, incidents his own stories seemed to eerily foretell. At his daughter’s darkest hours, Millar acted like his books’ hero Lew Archer; then turned her crises into the fiction from which they might have sprung.

  In his novels, Millar resolved his contradictions: there he hid and revealed an aching loneliness, a melancholy humor, and a lifetime of anger, fear, and regret. These singular works changed their genre and changed the way readers saw the world. In these stories, ordinary families became the stuff of mystery; and there was always guilt enough to go around. We recognized ourselves as characters in Ross Macdonald’s novels. And the most interesting Macdonald character of all was Kenneth Millar.

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  The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southward with a good wind and fair weather, till it reached the line.

  The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,

  Merrily did we drop

  Below the kirk, below the hill,

  Below the lighthouse top.

  The Sun came up upon the left,

  Out of the sea came he!

  And he shone bright, and on the right

  Went down into the sea.

  —S. T. Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

  Before Alzheimer’s disease put an end to his writing, Millar recorded his earliest memories: recollections formed in the final months of World War One, in Vancouver, British Columbia. His father was a harbor-boat pilot there, and Millar recalled the “unforgettable” occasion when his dad took him to sea: “I stood beside him in the offshore light, with his hands and my hand on the wheel.” At the age of sixty-three, he judged this “the happiest day of my childhood if not my life.”

  Millar’s parents separated when he was four, and his mother took him to a harsher province. As a troubled child and an uneasy adult, Ken Millar mourned the loss of that moment of bliss and belonging, of being loved and protected. The fiction he wrote was informed by the painful knowledge of the difference between the way life was supposed to be and the way it was. In his books, people looked obsessively for lost parents and vanished birthrights; children took dangerous paths; a detective tried to discover when and where and why it all went wrong.

  Vancouver wasn’t the first paradise he lost. Millar’s birthplace was California, something his parents never let him forget. In his youth that state took on a golden aura: the Great Right Place where he should be but wasn’t. He was born in Los Gatos, near San Francisco, during a heavy rainstorm at three in the morning of Monday, December 13, 1915.

  The Bay Area was celebrating that year, with a Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco to mark completion of the Panama Canal and the city’s recovery from the 1906 earthquake and fire. This Millar baby also became news of a sort: his father wrote a poem about him that was prin
ted in the Los Gatos Mail. The poet-father was John Macdonald “Jack” Millar, a forty-two-year-old Canadian who’d edited newspapers in British Columbia and Alberta settlements for the past several years. Defying its spelling, the family name was pronounced “Miller,” an ambiguous touchstone for a son who’d spend a lifetime pondering questions of identity.

  The dad had his own obsession with such matters, having lived with Indians in the Northwest Territories, befriended Japanese fishing families in Vancouver, and for years written poems in the dialect of a Scotland he’d never seen.

  John Macdonald Millar’s Scottish connection came through his father, another John Millar, who had emigrated from Galashiels (near Edinburgh) to southern Ontario, Canada, in 1856. The senior John Millar was a solid citizen, serving at different times as reeve (mayor), township clerk, postmaster, police magistrate, and justice of the peace. He and his Scots-Canadian wife had nine children, seven of whom survived; the sixth was Jack Millar, born in 1873. After teaching school and keeping a general store, the senior Millar started the Walkerton Herald, a newspaper that stayed in business for at least a century. Printer’s ink was in the Millar blood, some said: the first successful Scottish printer, around 1506, was a Millar. This “fatal predisposition to words” was passed on to Jack—along with a youthful rebellion. Jack Millar adopted his father’s Liberal politics but rejected his Presbyterian faith, becoming an admirer of Robert Green Ingersoll, “the Great Agnostic.” Like John Millar, who’d sailed from Scotland as a teenager, the teenaged Jack Millar left the family home early to strike out on his own.