Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  While writing his Archer novel, Millar found a couple of sources of quick income. Seeing in the Mystery Writers of America newsletter that Esquire was in the market for mysteries, he had von Auw submit Blue City there, and the monthly bought serial rights to his book for five hundred dollars. Millar thus made good on his college vow that he’d be published in the magazine of Hammett, Fitzgerald, and Callaghan. He also learned that the American (a general-interest monthly and no relation to the American Mercury, to which he sold a mainstream short story around this time) paid well for mystery “novelettes” by popular writers such as Erie Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, and even Graham Greene. The glossy American favored formula fiction with colorful settings and romantic endings; Margaret Millar had been unable to please its editors with a novelette commissioned six years ago. Millar tried now to cut a tale to its slick pattern and came up with “The Bearded Lady,” a story of art theft and murder in San Marcos, a Santa Barbara-like California city. Its hero-narrator was newspaperman Sam Drake, the lead from Millar’s second Dodd, Mead novel. “Bearded Lady” was tightly plotted and smoothly written, and its downbeat ending was offset by the promise of romance for Drake and a beautiful nurse. Crafting a novelette for this market made Millar uneasy; he called his story “very bad” and didn’t expect to sell it. He wrote Henry Branson: “I did it to prove to myself once and for all that the slicks aren’t for me, thus setting my mind at rest.” After sending “Lady” to von Auw, he turned his attention back to The Snatch.

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  Millar’s detective in the book, Lew Archer, was thirty-five (three years older than Millar), a former Long Beach police officer, married but being divorced. As a first-person narrator, he resembled Chandler’s Marlowe; in being morally implicated (or seeing himself so) in the corruption he investigates, he was more like Hammett’s Spade.

  Certainly the territory he works (for fifty to sixty-five dollars a day), the rancid West Coast paradise, brings Chandler to mind. But Archer’s California is postwar: faster, glitzier, and greedier than Marlowe’s. And Archer’s first client doesn’t live in the Chandlertowns of West Hollywood or Pasadena but in placid Santa Teresa: a Santa Barbara-like city a hundred and twenty miles (at least in this first book) north of LA. The missing man in the case isn’t the novelist of Millar’s early outline but an alcoholic oil millionaire named Ralph Sampson, who’s a bit like the eccentric inventor who drops from sight in Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man.

  Like a jazzman, Millar played variations on Chandler’s and Hammett’s themes, nervily putting his book forward as the next step in the PI tradition. When his client (the millionaire’s wife) offers him a drink, Archer refuses: “I’m the new-type detective.” Archer’s first meeting with his client evokes and inverts Marlowe’s entrance in The Big Sleep. There the client was the paralyzed and likable General Sternwood, clinging to life in a literal hothouse. Archer’s disagreeable Mrs. Sampson is paralyzed too, but youthful; she plans to outlive her husband and spend his money. Her main sickness is spiritual, and the insufferable heat here isn’t from a greenhouse but from the hammering California sun.

  There’s another nod to The Big Sleep. The psychopathic daughter in Chandler’s book was named Carmen. Sampson’s daughter is called Miranda. Together they recall Carmen Miranda, the movie spitfire who wore outlandish fruit headdresses. Millar’s Miranda isn’t crazy like Chandler’s Carmen, but her head’s full of fruity ideas. She tells Archer she speeds her car when she’s bored, rushing to meet something “utterly new. Something naked and bright, a moving target in the road.” He says, “You’ll meet something new. A smashed head and oblivion.” Like a lay analyst, Archer advises, “Find out what you feel about this business, and have a good cry, or you’ll end up schizo.” Miranda half-rhymes with Linda: maybe the author projected onto this ingenue some fears concerning his own daughter, growing up in a state full of new moral dangers.

  Millar subscribed to Wyndham Lewis’s idea of the writer as shaman: the one who endures by choice what others avoid, who experiences fear and evil for the rest of the tribe. That’s what artists did, Millar thought; and even a humble mystery writer could aspire to the role. As Archer seeks the missing millionaire, he sees the sickness in California society. And as Millar imagined the years to come, he couldn’t help but be concerned for his daughter’s future. Archer’s often afraid for females in this modern world. Afraid of them too: at one point it seems to him evil is “a female quality, a poison that women secreted and transmitted to men like disease.” Evil’s omnipresent in the Southland that Archer prowls, from the seemingly benign Santa Teresa to the movie lots where (recalling Margaret’s intuition) evil “hung in studio air like an odorless gas.”

  His first case took Archer to many scenes of LA’s postwar excess: an oakpaneled insiders’ restaurant near Hollywood and Vine, a louche jazz dive on the Strip, a mountaintop temple of a crackpot religion, a pueblo hotel off Wilshire. Disorder and perversion are everywhere. Mores break down as jaded citizens seek thrills and grifters look for a faster buck. In this amoral world, people want what they shouldn’t have. The aging lawyer wants the pretty girl who’s young enough to be his daughter (and rich enough to be his boss). The pretty girl wants excitement, “the moving target” in the road. The targets want to lash back in violence or blot out their pain with kicks.

  Archer’s not immune to the moral sickness. Sometimes he doubts his own identity in this “fairy-tale world” of false fronts and fake egos. His intellectual knowledge that life isn’t black-and-white is at odds with his excop urge to split the world into good and bad and punish the bad. “I’m fouled up,” he admits. But if Archer’s no saint, he’s a good private eye: he unravels the kidnapping, uncovers a racket in exploited Mexican workers, and fights a thug named Puddler to the death.

  Though deriving from Chandler and Hammett, The Snatch had its own tone and point of view: tough but not repellent, smart but not smug. The dialogue was crisp, the descriptions vivid. (Claude, the bogus prophet, by day “looked like the rayed sun in an old map”; at night, “a moonlit caricature of a Roman senator.”) There were sharp glimpses of soundstages and of nightlife dens. One ten-page sequence, from discovery of a ransom note through a fog-shrouded money drop to the finding of a corpse, was especially well done. What seemed most fresh was the book’s social conscience. Archer knows why the exploited Mexicans are treated like objects: “It makes it easier to gouge people if you don’t admit they’re human.” He sees how a town like Santa Teresa is divided into the rich and those who serve them, and how trying to leap from the latter to the former can destroy someone.

  Millar worked on the book for nearly a year, rewriting it from start to finish, forging his own voice and style to compete with postwar Chandler imitators (and with Chandler himself). He checked technical aspects with people at the FBI and the Justice and Immigration Departments, and he was pleased when a Santa Barbara lawyer read the manuscript and claimed it captured “the basic evil of this place (which is the book’s real subject) better than it has ever been done before.” Millar had dramatized some of his worst misgivings about California, and the result seemed to him and to other readers (including Margaret) pretty satisfying. He didn’t consider The Snatch a “literary” book; it was another bread-and-butter mystery, to keep his career going until he pulled his real novel into shape. But he was proud of The Snatch for what it was, and all but certain it would win quick favor at Knopf.

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  “Life is full of constant sordid surprises.”

  —Alfred Knopf, quoted in the New Yorker, 1948

  “Son of a bitch!”

  —Kenneth Millar, 1948

  If Alfred Knopf was America’s most imposing publisher, Bennett Cerf was perhaps its most charming. The urbane Cerf, head of Random House, had a flair for genially promoting his firm’s books through such outlets as his Saturday Review “Trade Winds” column. Visiting southern California in early 1948, Cerf sent readers t
his postcard of Margaret and Kenneth Millar:

  Beside the Santa Barbara Biltmore’s Olympic Pool I found Margaret Millar sunning her shapely torso while her husband, Kenneth Millar, took time out from a new whodunit for Knopf to give a diving exhibition that brought exclamations of wonder from Ed Corle and a Flicka of the eyelashes from Mary O’Hara. Margaret Millar’s new book, It’s All in the Family, is the most delightful story I have read in months. I laughed so hard over the galleys that I wired home to triple the print order.

  Margaret’s latest was a fictionalized account of her twenties girlhood. While Millar struggled with a depressing novel about his wretched Kitchener youth, his wife wrote a comic account of her more privileged upbringing in the same town. Random House hesitated before buying the book, then geared up to promote it heavily, predicting a minor best-seller.

  However well It’s All in the Family might do, though (it was excerpted in the May issue of Ladies’ Home Journal), there’d be no royalties until 1949. As of May 31, the Millars’ ’48 income was only two hundred dollars. Monies were due from other sales (a Dell reprint of The Iron Gates, a British edition of Blue City), but no telling when they’d arrive. The Millars lived on dwindling savings, budgeting almost as tightly as they had in Ann Arbor. Millar was depending on the thousand dollars Knopf would likely pay for his private-eye book.

  By the time of Cerf’s trip, the Millars were a bit more at home in Santa Barbara. They’d made friends: children’s book author Don Freeman and his artist wife, Lydia; humorist-screenwriter M. M. Musselman; ragtimepiano-playing English professor George Hand; a bookstore-owning couple. Millar was delighted to learn F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote part of The Last Tycoon near Santa Barbara’s Miramar Beach. (Gatsby’s Daisy honeymooned in Santa Barbara.) Millar collected such scraps of proof that the town wasn’t quite the intellectual backwater it first seemed, but he still felt isolated. The Santa Ynez mountain range he saw from his yard looked to him like the Great Wall of China, cutting him off from the cultural currents of America.

  While his old college chum Bob Ford, now chargé d’affaires at the Canadian embassy in Moscow (and the dedicatee of Blue City), sent him fascinating bulletins via diplomatic pouch about meetings with Arthur Koestler and Fernand Léger and Vladimir Horowitz, Millar attended minor-league baseball games, drank rounds with Santa Barbara News-Press staffers, and took daily swims in the Pacific. Only the occasional visiting fireman like Cerf enlivened his quiet routine.

  Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis, a Random House author, was another celebrity who called on the Millars during a Santa Barbara stay. “He was off the sauce that whole summer,” Margaret Millar recalled, “and very very pleasant. He would come to our house and bring a bottle of booze for us, I don’t know why, and soda water for himself. He was really trying hard. (Of course that changed, and he became a drunk again later.) At first you thought how ugly he was, but after a while you didn’t notice. He was just so pleasant to us, with not particularly any reason why he should be. He autographed our walls.” Lewis told Santa Barbara writer Barnaby Conrad (another Random House author) he envied the Millars. “Their talent?” asked Conrad. “No,” said the unlucky-in-love Lewis, “their marriage.”

  The Millars of course didn’t show Lewis any sign of the strains they were under. The book Margaret was writing in 1948, The Cannibal Heart, gave sharper glimpses into an edgy union that seemed based on her own:

  In the past week Mark had become less nervous and tense, but at the same time increasingly critical of her. She blamed it partly on herself and partly on the circumstance of their isolation. Mark had always been surrounded by people. . . . Whatever they wanted Mark always tried to give them, but eventually he reached the point where his nerves began to crack and he had to get away for a while by himself. Once he was away from people, though, he began almost immediately to miss them. It seemed to Evelyn that she was expected to make up the loss and she couldn’t do it.

  One way Millar could be around people was to pay daily visits to the Coral Casino Beach Club. Across from the Biltmore Hotel, the beach club was the site of Cerf’s poolside snapshot. The Millars joined the Coral Casino partly to have a place to entertain people like Cerf; using it for business purposes also let them deduct a third of their three-hundred-dollar yearly dues. A gray, wooden, barrackslike building, the club had two dining areas and a tiered complex with about a hundred cabanas arranged horseshoe-style around an outdoor pool. There was beach access; the Millars ate lunch at the club before or after their half-mile ocean swims. Here Millar studied privileged Santa Barbarans at close range, watching and listening at will. The Coral Casino was his laboratory, his spyhole: an essential source of information for his southern California books. The club would appear under aliases in many Kenneth and Margaret Millar novels.

  Millar taught himself to high-dive off the Coral Casino platform tower after studying an Olympic team at practice. Don Pearce, who later moved to Santa Barbara, witnessed him in action: “He would go up there—this was a pretty good tower, twelve meters, approximately thirty-six feet—and stand at the far end, studying the board. Then he would walk forward deliberately and slowly, turn around—and stand in statuesque stillness for an unconscionable length of time. It was perfectly clear he was rehearsing or imagining every movement of the dive he was about to take. Then he would go up, and out, and over, and down, doing a jackknife or something like it. The legs were frequently not together properly, so the entry was spoiled a bit; it was clear he was a self-taught rather than an instructed diver. But he simply determined to do that, and succeeded in doing it, by thinking it over so thoroughly—and then did it. Why?” To conquer his fear of it—not that he told anyone. “He was a great man for testing himself,” said Hugh Kenner, another Santa Barbara friend.

  Millar’s life seemed to be one test after another, or the same test prolonged. When The Three Roads was published in mid-1948, he felt he was failing. The new book got some nice notices: “highly recommended” was the New Yorker’s verdict; “distinguished” judged the Saturday Review, with that magazine’s mystery expert nominating Roads best thriller of the year. James Sandoe of the Chicago Sun, who’d scorned Blue City, thought Roads “an astonishing stride beyond” the previous book. But Howard Haycraft in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine said Roads suffered “from overmuch psychiatry.” Helen B. Parker in the New York Times Book Review, on the other hand, could have done with more psychiatric content and lamented Millar’s choosing “the Hitchcock fork rather than the Jungian curve.” The negative reviews loomed larger; Millar thought them wrongheaded, but they discouraged him.

  Also oddly discouraging was the news that the American was buying his spec novelette for five thousand dollars. That was much more than he’d made from any book, and it would solve the Millars’ cash-flow problem; but the sale depressed him, since he thought the story awful. “It took me months to make it bad enough,” he wrote the Bransons, “and nearly cost me my precarious sanity.” To learn he had a knack for creating the trash he’d once thrown down the Kitchener sewer, when his best book met with critical apathy and he couldn’t bring off his work in progress, made him think he’d never be a decent writer. Maybe he should pack it in.

  In this downbeat mood Millar took the train in July to Chicago and the Midwestern Writers Conference, where he’d earn three hundred dollars critiquing manuscripts and conducting the novel workshop. Linda and Margaret came with him (Margaret took part in a panel); afterward they’d go on to Canada for a long-anticipated visit “home.” The last thing Millar did before leaving was send the finished draft of his Lew Archer mystery, The Snatch, to New York for submission.

  Nelson Algren was also attending the Chicago writers conference. Millar looked forward to meeting the author who’d been so nice to Blue City (Algren also singled Millar out in a Chicago speech as a writer to watch), but the best the two managed was a wave and a shout across a crowded room. Millar spent his free time in Chicago bookstore-browsing with Nolan Miller, a writer he
’d known in Michigan, and Feike Feikema, a burly novelist whose publisher billed him “the Thomas Wolfe of the Midwest.”

  With her book It’s All in the Family just out, Margaret did a radio interview in Chicago and three more in Toronto, where Millar joined her and Linda after a stop in Ann Arbor to visit the Pearces, the Bransons, and his old professor Thorpe. In Toronto, Random House of Canada gave Margaret Millar a luncheon in a dining room overlooking the university she’d once attended. On this return to the country of their youth, Margaret was clearly the star of the household, as she’d been the star three years earlier when Millar returned to his “home state” of California at the time of her Iron Gates success. As Roads got a second round of mixed reviews, Family drew raves and climbed on the New York Herald Tribune best-seller list. Margaret still relied on Ken’s editing and plotting advice, but Millar considered her the more naturally gifted writer. With this best-seller she’d outpaced him again in their “friendly and healthy” career competition.

  Millar wanted to write good fiction for the general reader. His background made him a common man, and that’s whom he hoped to reach (without speaking down to). Though he loved “mandarin” authors such as Joyce and Proust, he didn’t aim to be one. He aspired to enter the excellent mainstream of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Farrell, Faulkner, Algren. But Millar feared he wouldn’t make enough money, and he feared becoming a hack. He didn’t want to ruin his talent and abandon his goal; he didn’t want to be like Hollywood writers, earning big cash for bad work and mourning lost ideals.