Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Getting around by bus and bike in this postwar year when cars were scarce, the Millars made field trips to different neighborhoods. At night they went bar-crawling along lower State. Millar liked Santa Barbara’s small-town feel. He enjoyed riding his bicycle the twenty-one blocks from Bath to the ocean and back. The town didn’t have or need traffic lights; there were so few cars he could cruise down the center of the narrow main street (past the art museum, the library, and the Lobero Theater, and around the “old California” courthouse) with the Millars’ black mutt, Skipper, running behind. The people who strolled State, including newspaper publisher Tom Storke (as tall as his name, and always wearing a high-crowned ranger’s hat), all seemed to know each other. Millar’s favorite Santa Barbara place was the coastline, where ocean and beach met and made something better than land or sea. He and Margaret took daily swims, whatever the water temperature. Margaret adored their new town. “When you grew up in Kitchener, Ontario,” she said, “where you had to pass the slaughterhouse on the way to school every day, Santa Barbara seemed like paradise.”

  Evenings when they didn’t barhop, the Millars stayed home and played gin rummy, read, listened to records. Millar had a growing collection of jazz discs, heavy on piano players: Mary Lou Williams, Fats Waller, Meade Lux Lewis, and (thanks to 78s sent from Canada by Don Pearce) a Montreal fellow named Oscar Peterson, whose version of Ellington’s “C Jam Blues” was a special favorite. Ellington showed what you could do in popular art: make uncommonly good work from common materials. Thus did the crowd-pleasing Elizabethan revenge play become “The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark.”

  For his part, Millar hoped “to rise through mysteries to the serious novel,” he wrote Henry Branson, “but at the moment I’d rather write good commercial tripe than unpublished serious stuff, and that’s what I’m doing.” In June he started his second book in two months: a “psychothriller” about an amnesiac naval lieutenant hunting his wife’s killer in LA. For plot reasons it would be told in the third person, a voice that didn’t come naturally to him (though Maggie used it exclusively). Millar put a lot of himself into the alienated naval man and a lot of Margaret into his screenwriter girlfriend. The Three Roads took Millar’s fresh impressions of many Hollywood types: the witty, alcoholic studio people; the opportunistic hustlers; all the sunbaked souls in anxious misery. Halfway through his manuscript, Millar wrote Branson this was becoming “the first book of mine I’m not ashamed of, though I suppose I shall be by the time it gets into print.”

  As he penned the last chapters of this “psychiatric mystery,” Dodd, Mead published Trouble Follows Me, the spy story finished aboard the Shipley Bay. The book got kind notices (the New Republic called it “literate and exciting,” and Boucher said it showed “a God-given ability to write which has no business striking twice in the Millar family”), but Millar knew he could do better, had already done better, and felt it time he broke away from Dodd, Mead and its elementary Red Badge line.

  Millar had agent Ivan von Auw submit Blue City as a one-book option deal, so if Dodd, Mead rejected it, von Auw could take it—and Millar—elsewhere. The ploy worked. Dodd, Mead turned down Blue City, despite von Auw’s getting them to give it a second read. The agent next tried Blue City on Henry Branson’s publisher, Simon & Schuster; they passed on it too. (Random House was out: the house said at the time of The Dark Tunnel its policy was not to publish spouses of Random authors.) Millar made a bold suggestion: send Blue City to the best publisher in America, Alfred A. Knopf. As the imprint of Hammett, Chandler, and James M. Cain (three of the “toughest” writers in U.S. letters), Knopf wouldn’t be put off by Millar’s violent Midwestern fable; and Knopf would be ideal for the better books Millar hoped to write soon. Von Auw agreed to send “Alfred” the manuscript.

  The anxious tension of the next several weeks was relieved by the arrival of the car Margaret had ordered back in 1945: a fourteen-hundred-dollar Chevrolet sedan. It was the first automobile either Millar ever had. “I owned a house before I owned a car,” Margaret said. “Ken had forgotten how to drive. Our neighbor at that time started him driving again, but I never got the feeling that he was quite at home behind the wheel of a car.” Nonetheless Millar took off on solo excursions, exploring out-of-the-way beaches and mountain passes, even getting as far as Las Vegas, Nevada, where mobsters (colleagues perhaps of the ones who might have put slots into Kitchener and kept tabs on his Winnipeg uncle) were to Millar’s disgust decreeing neon-lit pleasure domes in the desert.

  The good news came in November: if Millar would polish the ending and take out a few scatological words, Knopf would be pleased to publish Blue City. An overjoyed Millar swiftly agreed. His Dodd, Mead gamble had paid off. Knopf taking his book made him feel he was on the way up. Probably Knopf would take The Three Roads too. It looked as if Millar’s one-year race to be a professional writer was won five months early.

  The family celebrated by trimming a Christmas tree the night before Millar’s December 13 birthday. Now it was time for the next test: writing that “real” novel. In late December he took the plunge.

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  “Just what is your business? You’re not an artist?”

  “Hardly. I’m a private detective.”

  —Kenneth Millar, “The Bearded Lady”

  Whenever I am asked what kind of writing is the most lucrative, I have to say, ransom notes.

  —H. N. Swanson

  Sitting in Santa Barbara in the red-leather armchair, Millar imagined a sixteen-year-old high school senior named William, living, in this postwar year, in Rockfield, Ohio. In most respects, though, William was in Kitchener, Ontario, in 1931: his story was Millar’s own.

  “I’m having my fling at serious fiction,” Millar told Anthony Boucher, with a book “about an adolescent boy being shoved into delinquency by social and economic pressure. That may sound familiar in summary, but I think I’m writing it fresh.” It was close to the bone, anyhow. William lived with his mother, grandmother, aunt, and unmarried uncle in a tall, old house that loomed “like something left over from a sad and dingy past.” Every dreary detail is pressed into William’s mind: “the fanlight of purple glass over the front door . . . each sliver of peeling softwood floor, the thousand faded roses stencilled on the walls, the long bruise of water across the ceiling.” Wearing baggy pants and a plaid windbreaker he’s outgrown, William shunts between his suffocating home, the school where he’s snubbed, and the pool hall. His stroke-crippled father is in the charity ward of the public hospital; his mother’s a pathetic creature whose illusions he resents and protects: “He lived in a world which she didn’t realize existed. . . . He played pool, lusted after women, read dirty books, ran wild in the streets at night, suffered under the eyes of the well-heeled every day and hated them for it, carried the guilt of his father’s poverty. He didn’t even believe in God anymore. And his mother didn’t even know he smoked cigarettes. She had enough troubles of her own. . . . Silence and trickery were his only recourse.”

  This was Winter Solstice, the serious novel Millar felt he owed himself but postponed until his thrillers paid some bills. It was put-up-or-shut-up time now, but Millar was having trouble turning his past into fiction. To shape your material you needed to be objective, and the things he was writing about made him angry and upset.

  As he wrestled with fact and fiction, his first Knopf book was readied for publication. Blue City would be presented in fine style, with a handsome dust jacket and ads that linked Millar to Cain, Hammett, and Chandler. Alfred Knopf himself wrote to welcome Millar to the house: “I was much intrigued by the discovery of how very different our opinion of this book is from that held by your former publishers. We will do our best to prove Dodd, Mead wrong.” Millar later learned Tommy Dodd had contacted Knopf angrily, certain Millar and his agent had sold Knopf a different manuscript from the one Dodd’s editors had twice turned down.

  “I prize your imprint,” Milla
r candidly told Knopf. It wasn’t an imprint you took for granted, he learned. Knopf’s thousand-dollar contract for Blue City omitted the standard option giving the firm first crack at the author’s next book; Knopf wanted to see that book before he bought it. Millar’s trick with Dodd, Mead was being played back on him.

  In June 1947, von Auw submitted The Three Roads. The three Knopfs (Alfred; wife and partner, Blanche; son Alfred “Pat” Jr.) all liked it, but they thought the novel slow in starting and that it should be cut by two hundred pages. Millar sent a revision outline and said he’d start rewriting immediately; but he told Knopf, “If you should decide to go ahead pari passu with the preparation of the contract, I’d feel happier about the whole thing.” Knopf did not so decide; Millar went ahead on faith.

  Blue City’s reviews were far from cheering. “Very, very tough,” the New Yorker summarized, “and a little silly, too.” The Saturday Review’s unappetizing assessment: “Raw meat.” Boucher in the San Francisco Chronicle was kinder: “Routine enough in concept and in much of its plot; but Mr. Millar is to be congratulated on his sharp prose, his absorbing tempo, and above all on his ability to create a hardboiled hero who is not a storm trooper.”

  That was in response to another “hero” debuting this season: Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, in the very violent I, the Jury. With his comicbook plot and his thuggish protagonist, Spillane hijacked the hard-boiled tradition, looting its lurid aspects and tossing out its stylistic and moral controls. (Millar would privately refer to Spillane as “the poet laureate of sexual psychopathy.”)

  James Sandoe, the Chicago Sun’s mystery man, also gave Blue City credit for being “a good deal less offensive” than Spillane’s “shabby and rather nasty little venture,” but Sandoe (a Chandler partisan and a Margaret Millar booster) took umbrage at Knopf’s comparing Millar to Chandler, Hammett, and Cain. Of Blue City, Sandoe said, “Its plot is as transparent as its ingredients are familiar, and it lacks any distinguishing force of character.”

  These discouraging words didn’t bother Millar much once he’d seen the Philadelphia Inquirer review by Nelson Algren, whose Never Come Morning partly inspired Blue City. Algren was generous: “Blue City retains its own pattern, stands on its own legs all the way, and is written without the pellmell haste with which this sort of thriller is so commonly turned out. Kenneth Millar never uses two words where one will do; and when he wants you to see a thing, you see it.” The Chicago novelist rated Millar’s descriptive prose just short of Stephen Crane’s and said Blue City was “a whacking good thriller.” It was the first important review of Millar’s career, all the more meaningful coming from someone he was a fan of. “Unless one or two things like that happen in the course of your life,” he said later, “you don’t go on.”

  He needed encouragement. The Three Roads revisions dragged through summer and into fall. While Millar admitted his novel read better for being shorter, he resented having to cut “ten thousand good words.” More changes were requested in September, and he made those too. Finally, after three months of rewrites, on September 26, Knopf drew up a contract with a thousand-dollar advance for The Three Roads. By then the firm had shipped some forty-five hundred copies of Blue City to bookstores; in a regretful tone that Millar would grow to know well, Knopf wrote, “I am not delighted with this sale,” though he said neither of them “should feel too disappointed.”

  Millar responded with the laconic hope that a reprint deal might reimburse Knopf’s expense. His confidence was badly shaken. What he’d thought was his best book (Roads) barely got published, reviewers had mocked Blue City, and Winter Solstice was bogged down. Millar now learned he had gout, the first of several postwar ailments he thought were his body’s way of coping with psychic distress. As if in sympathetic (or competitive) misery, Margaret developed a bad cold and Linda broke an arm. Millar added medical bills to his worries.

  The couple’s income had fallen sharply after the Warners windfall. Their combined earnings in 1947 would be under twelve thousand dollars (with Millar bringing in only two thousand). Warners never made a movie of The Iron Gates (no leading actress, including Bette Davis, wanted a role that ended two-thirds through the picture), but Margaret kept her studio contacts open. She wrote a fifteen-page critique of another writer’s treatment of the James Cain novel Serenade for director Mike Curtiz and discussed a screenplay of Knopf author Forrest Rosaire’s East of Midnight for producer Mark Hellinger, but no assignments came.

  Millar also sought Hollywood work through agent H. N. Swanson. Hellinger, needing a Humphrey Bogart vehicle, requested a copy of Blue City, and director Allan Dwan asked how much the book’s film rights would cost. Swanson (who it turned out was Raymond Chandler’s Hollywood agent) said twenty-five thousand dollars, then shrugged when Dwan balked; “I feel we can get a much better setup elsewhere,” Swanson wrote Millar, but nothing happened. Millar was leery of “Swanee,” this sauve Sunset Strip smoothie with the slick Hollywood backchat (“As far as the job situation is concerned, blood is running in the streets here, hip deep”), but the Millars seemed stuck with him as Ober’s West Coast op.

  Millar needed to do another book, for money and to keep his career going. Winter Solstice was in no shape to submit. “By God I’ll fall back on my thrillers rather than not be published,” he vowed to Branson. “Writing badly is only the second sin in my book; not being published is the first.” After the Three Roads experience, Millar thought his next Knopf manuscript should be a quick, colorful, salable piece of goods.

  He consulted the plot notebooks he’d started keeping and found several ideas there involving hit-and-run. “Man chases hit-run slayer of his child all over,” read one, “forgives him when he catches him.” Another had a district attorney fatally running down his wife and forcing a garageman to repaint the damaged car. Hit-and-run engaged Millar’s fictive imagination early: The Dark Tunnel, written in Michigan, contained a reference to “a bad hit-run case on the other side of town.” In California, where cars seemed a cultural imperative, he saw many story possibilities involving auto crime. Late in 1947, Millar wrote eighteen pages of a tale called Hit and Run in which a boxer kills a man in a fistfight, then conspires with the man’s wife to make the death look like a hit-run accident.

  But Millar put Hit and Run aside in favor of another plot. At the back of a spiral-bound pad he made four pages of notes for The Snatch, a mystery about the missing Benedict Swain, a famous author working under poor terms at a Hollywood studio. Swain resembles Faulkner (and his name is like Faulkner’s movie agent “Swanee” Swanson’s). Swain may be on a bender or he may have been abducted, or perhaps he chose to disappear à la Ambrose Bierce. In any case the studio wants him back. Hired to find him would be “Rogers, or a similar man under another name,” Rogers being the private detective in the Hollywood-oriented “Find the Woman,” written shortly after Millar met Faulkner at Warners.

  Private eyes were having a boom year in 1947. There seemed a great postwar yearning for the type of tough, capable figure popularized by Hammett and Chandler. Hammett wasn’t writing books, and Chandler didn’t often (his most recent was in 1943); but movies and radio were full of private investigators, and several book writers (Frederick Brown, Thomas B. Dewey, John Evans, Wade Miller) started new PI series. Millar revived his idea of creating a successor to Marlowe. The Snatch, though its outline changed a lot, was the “quick, colorful, salable” mystery Millar would write.

  To do so, he needed privacy. The pressure he felt to match Margaret’s success, along with the Solstice setback, made things tense at 2124 Bath. Millar wanted someplace else to write. Margaret’s sister had moved to an apartment on Sola; she said Millar could use her place when she was at work. In the last months of 1947, he bicycled there each day and wrote chapters of his first private-eye novel.

  Millar had it in mind to do a series of books with this detective, who needed a better name than Joe Rogers. A dozen years earlier, in a poem for the Waterloo college paper, he’d use
d his mother’s mother’s maiden name, Bowman, to symbolize a divine archer (“What Bowman launched thee forth?”). In naming this book’s lead, he now leapt from Bowman to Archer; nice too, he thought, because the archer stood for Sagittarius, Millar’s astrological sign. (His detective, though, was a Gemini, with the birthdate of June 2: the Millars’ anniversary. In the first Archer book, an astrology buff tells Lew that the Gemini male “often marries a woman older than himself.” Margaret was ten months older than Millar.) He had no conscious thought of Miles Archer, Sam Spade’s murdered partner in Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. When he later saw the similarity of names, Millar drew attention to it and sometimes claimed it had been intentional; still later, he admitted it wasn’t. If he’d been thinking consciously of anyone, it may have been the Mr. Archer who taught at his Kitchener high school. The real link though was with Millar himself. “I’m not Archer, exactly,” he’d say famously, “but Archer is me.” From birthday to family tree, Archer and author are twinned.

  Archer’s first name seems to have come on a chain of mental associations. The United Church magazines editor who bought Millar’s first professional stories was Archer Wallace. Detective Archer, another beginning for Millar, might have brought Archer Wallace to mind, which in turn may have prompted thought of author Lew Wallace. Millar, who’d always liked the name Lew, would say, “Lew Archer was actually named after General Lew Wallace, who wrote Ben-Hur.” Bowman to Archer, to Archer Wallace, to Lew Wallace, to Lew Archer. Significantly or not, Archer shares initials with the city of Los Angeles, where he works from an office at 84111/2 Sunset Boulevard, a few blocks east on the Strip from H. N. Swanson’s agency at 8523.