Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  The Drowning Pool moves like a fast movie, with scenes set from the San Fernando Valley to Las Vegas; half the book’s action occurs in a single day and night. The novel’s a bit spoiled by a heavy-breathing subplot involving Archer with a dubious businessman’s wife. Maggie Millar didn’t care for this part, nor for the bloody fistfight that ended the book, but Millar thought the hard-boiled form and its readers demanded such chapters. He put them to his own good use. We learn the businessman, owner of a controlling interest in Nopal Valley’s oil company, acquired his first fortune peddling black-market cars in Detroit. Success makes him legitimate; now he’s “grand old California stock.” Such revelations of “the way things work” updated the insights a teenaged Millar gleaned reading Hammett in Ontario, and they dramatized the unreality of life in the Golden State.

  Archer tracks California fakery to a primary source when he visits a Hollywood movie studio (unnamed, but obviously Warners). Gazing at a hagiographic gallery of the studio’s stars, the detective imagines how easily two of the good-looking people in this case might have entered that pantheon—except one is dead on a slab, the other in police custody. “The happy endings and the biggest oranges,” he reflects, “were the ones that California saved for export.”

  Archer’s more sensitive to the people around him in Pool than he was in Target. He’s especially aware of the California perils that menace young females. The fallen Gretchen shows one way a girl can go wrong in this land of sun and shadows. Mavis Kilbourne, an evil man’s kept wife, shows another. Then there’s Cathy Slocum, whose near-genius IQ doesn’t bring wisdom. Archer muses, “The night was murmurous with the voices of girls who threw their youth away and got the screaming meemies at three or four A.M.”

  Surely some of Archer’s concern for young women came from Millar’s worries about his ten-year-old daughter, whose adjustment to California life was shaky. Linda seemed more out of place in Santa Barbara after the family’s most recent Michigan stay. She felt different from other kids here and thought she was ugly. For years she’d loved art; one of her drawings was bought by the Santa Barbara museum, and a good critic said her work showed great promise. Yet when an elementary school teacher insisted she enter an art contest, Linda went into a rage and refused ever to make another picture.

  Millar thought Linda’s personality problems would work themselves out in time, but he was forming the habit of turning his immediate concerns—including his daughter’s problems—into fiction. In The Drowning Pool, which twists patterns from Greek drama and Freudian psychology into a postwar Electra tragedy, Millar and his wife and daughter are the actors behind the grotesque masks of the Slocum family.

  Millar thought Drowning Pool was a good cut above Moving Target—more sensitive and subjective, and with a better plot. Since Raymond Chandler had apparently stopped writing books, Millar felt Pool gave him (or “Macdonald”) a shot at being the best private-eye novelist going. Chandler surprised him in 1949 with The Little Sister, the first Marlowe in six years, published not by Knopf (whom Chandler had left after four books) but by Houghton Mifflin. Millar didn’t read the new Marlowe (wanting to avoid further Chandler influence), but he read its mixed reviews. Boucher’s New York Times piece was harsh; it said Sister showed “the spectacle of a prose writer of high attainments wasting his talents in a pretentious attempt to make bricks without straw—or much clay, either.” The Chandler was conspicuously absent from Boucher’s Times list of 1949’s dozen best mysteries. Notably present there was John Macdonald’s The Moving Target, of which Boucher said, “Human compassion and literary skill returns the much-abused hard-boiled detective story to its original Hammett-high level.” Even with Chandler still writing, it seemed Macdonald’s Archer might be halfway to becoming what Millar imagined four years ago on the Shipley Bay: a “successor to Marlowe.”

  Millar wrote Knopf shortly after submitting Pool, “I have an idea that Archer as he becomes known will do quite well for both of us. I hear on all sides, though I refrain from reading Chandler myself, that Chandler’s last book wasn’t good, which leaves a bit of a vacuum in the field.” Knopf, who had read The Little Sister, replied, “Chandler’s last was just as well written as ever, but it exposed clearly his weakness and satisfied me that there were quite sound reasons why we had never sold him as he thought he ought to be sold. He just can’t build a plot; in fact I don’t think he even tries. The result is that the book sparkles and is brilliant in parts, but simply doesn’t hang together or build up to the necessary climax.” In any case, Knopf was sold on The Drowning Pool; the firm was “very glad indeed” to publish the book, he said: “It’s a good job.” Knopf settled with von Auw on a thousand-dollar advance for Pool (twice the bargain rate paid for Target), and the firm’s contract included an option on the next two Millar novels. The publisher now told his Santa Barbara author, who was still calling him “Mr. Knopf,” “For Heaven’s sake don’t go on being so formal.” From now on it should be “Ken” and “Alfred.”

  Through hard work, good prose, and a cooperative attitude—and by making money—Millar had earned Knopf’s respect. As a rule the publisher didn’t read his firm’s suspense or mystery manuscripts, but he always read Millar’s. Alfred and Blanche Knopf believed Millar was a serious novelist on a par with Cain and Hammett and Chandler. “He was one of the few authors my father dealt with directly,” Pat Knopf said. In early 1950, Alfred told Ken, “I . . . quite agree that we ought to get somewhere with Archer.” Neither of them perhaps guessed how far, nor how long it would take.

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  You haven’t let me down at all after the limb I went & climbed out on with your first Macdonald. You’re still right up there on top of the hardboiled field. . . . I’m especially struck with the way you turn the Chandlerism, the colorful unlikely metaphor or simile, into legitimate novelistic indication of character, rather than trick writing for its own sake.

  —Anthony Boucher to Kenneth Millar, regarding The Drowning Pool

  You seem to have committed yourself to one of the most parochial and overworked fields of writing there is—a style so desperately overdone that in some of its recent manifestations (for instance, The Drowning Pool by John Ross MacDonald) it has become a burlesque. There are pages in this book which are pure parody. The man has ability. He could be a good writer. Yet everything in his book is borrowed, and everything in it is spoiled by exaggeration.

  —Raymond Chandler to James M. Fox

  It was an extraordinary occasion for Ken and Margaret Millar, formerly of Kitchener, Ontario: a Saturday-evening dinner party in February 1950 at the Palm Springs estate of Darryl F. Zanuck, the cigar-chomping boss of the Twentieth Century-Fox film studio. The stellar company at Zanuck’s included playwright-director Moss Hart and wife, Kitty Carlisle; veteran performers Jack Oakie, George Jessel, and Louis Jourdan; Fox director Jean Negulesco; various well-endowed females and assorted males; and Mr. and Mrs. Bennett Cerf: the Millars’ hosts for a weekend at the nearby resort of La Quinta. Millar thought his wife’s urbane publisher the most engaging man he’d ever met, and this glimpse Cerf allowed him of a movie mogul’s desert palace proved invaluable to his fiction.

  “Anything that fantasy can invent will find its real-life counterpart in California,” Millar wrote Alfred Knopf; he described some of the events at Zanuck’s: “George Jessel made a series of wonderful speeches in dialect and a cowboy suit. He informed me that he too was a potential Knopf author, on religious themes, and on the strength of this rather tenuous bond we had our picture taken together by Moss Hart, who was wildly enthusiastic about a new thousand-dollar camera he had bought. There Zanuck himself was shaved in public by a barber in the middle of his living room, and afterwards took off his shoes and sat with his bare feet twinkling aloft on the table. Sic sedet gloria mundi. John Macdonald was all eyes and ears.” He wasn’t kidding. Five years from now Millar would weave memories and fantasies of this night into a long party sequence i
n Macdonald’s Hollywood-oriented The Barbarous Coast. Before that, he’d insert expressionist sketches of Zanuck into a couple of Archer short stories.

  Exotic outings like this were rare for the Millars. In 1950, Millar found a more accessible source of inspiration. Alone or with Margaret, he went regularly to the Santa Barbara county courthouse, a Spanish Revival structure whose tower clock dominated the downtown skyline. The Millars would attend dozens of murder and other trials here over the years. Millar’s impressive gift for reading character (honed in a childhood depending on quick assessments) was sharpened in the courtroom. Journalist Brad Darrach captured Millar in action:

  A fierce old man sits sputtering in the witness box. . . . “See the eyes, the forehead, the nose?” Millar whispers. “Dominated by reason. But the mouth is completely appalled! As if all his life the mouth had been dragged, protesting, by the will.” Frail and exhausted, the old man’s wife sits blankly at the litigant’s table. “The suit was his idea,” Millar whispers. “When she was injured, he was walking beside her. Now he has to prove he wasn’t to blame. He’ll prove it if it kills her!” Under cross-examination, the old man makes careless admissions that damage his wife’s case. “See? He doesn’t really want to win the suit. Having failed with his wife, he’s demanding satisfaction from society.” Millar sighs. “That’s the story of all reformers.”

  Santa Barbara lawyer Harris Seed, who became friends with the Millars in 1951, said the writers were constant presences at most major Santa Barbara trials for a quarter century: “He and Margaret sat through the big ones, whether they took a week, a month, or two months. They participated in those trials. And most of the time, if you knew what you were looking for, eventually you could find the thread of the heinous murder or whatever crime led to the trial in one of their books.”

  The Millars grew friendly with prosecutors, judges, and clerks, who’d alert them to interesting cases. Millar learned early not to base fiction too closely on fact. At the first murder trial he attended in Santa Barbara, an alibi witness dropped dead of a heart attack right after testifying. Such melodrama would seem absurd in a novel. Millar felt he’d marred The Drowning Pool with a hydrotherapy torture scene based on a real Santa Barbara incident. He’d become better at balancing truth with invention. He wrote Pat Knopf, “It’s rather fun to see how much stuff I can get a detective story to carry without going completely haywire.”

  With his academic mentors, Millar took a more apologetic tone toward his “bread-and-butter” work, describing his private-eye novels to Thorpe as “pseudonymous books written, too quickly, for the rather rigid requirements of the commercial market.” But there was one brilliant scholar with whom Millar felt free to show his enthusiasm for detective fiction: young Hugh Kenner, a new member of the UCSB English faculty. The bespectacled Kenner, extremely tall and thin, was a native of Peterborough, Ontario. “I grew up in a part of southern Ontario he knew,” Kenner said, “and I think he thought there was some kind of bond between us. He seemed to regard Canada as a country to make wry jokes about, but it was not something he ever went into. He was a very complicated man, and you observed more than you understood. Even though I saw him a lot, I never felt I knew him very well. I don’t know anyone who did.”

  Kenner met Millar at the home of George Hand, the ragtime-piano-playing Santa Barbara College dean. Soon Kenner was paying frequent visits to the Millars’ Bath Street cottage. “Ken was a guarded, laconic man,” Kenner found. “He spoke few words, carefully chosen, but the carefully chosen words were always to the point. In his monosyllabic way he could be extremely good company, and when he was talking about something he understood—for example, knowledge of literary technique—I never met anybody to surpass him. His intelligence was obviously of a very high order.”

  Kenner’s own intellect was formidable. Twenty-seven when he met Millar, Kenner was on the brink of a dazzling career as a critic specializing in the revolutionary moderns (Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Beckett). Listening to Kenner talk, Millar said, was like taking several graduate courses at once.

  As knowledgeable as Kenner was, he saw he could learn a thing or two from Millar. He began bringing essays and other works in progress to Bath Street, where Millar helped the scholar see that exposition and narrative were not separate things. “Ken was quietly persuasive,” Kenner said. “All was narrative. When hard to follow, it was bad narrative.” Recommending an ABA “sonata” or “sandwich” framework, Millar helped Kenner organize his study of Wyndham Lewis, a work Kenner calls his “first good book.” Kenner would be known as a notably readable academic; his writing always followed the approach Millar devised for this Lewis book. “He was immensely valuable to me,” said Kenner.

  In turn Kenner read the galleys of Millar’s books to catch errors of detail or logic. Like Auden, Kenner wasn’t ashamed of enjoying mysteries. He encouraged Millar’s effort to fill his novels with meaning and predicted, “You will write the Ulysses of the tecs yet, i.e., the book that exhausts the form and simultaneously brings it to the realization of all of which it is capable.”

  Kenner said, “Ken’s working quota I think was five pages a day. That meant getting that five pages into a pretty quasi-final form. He said the economics of mystery writing really required that you produce two books a year, and between them Ken and Margaret could do that. He pointed out that a number of other mystery writers after World War II began to overproduce out of necessity. A good example is John Dickson Carr, also known as Carter Dickson. He reached a point where he was doing like three and four a year, and they got to be pretty poor. It was simply that you could no longer live on the rate of production that had worked in the 1930s. So that arrangement of Ken and Margaret’s was what kept them going.”

  Al Stump, a sports journalist for magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, had a different sort of friendship with Millar than Kenner’s. “We never talked a lot about writing,” Stump said. “We’d talk mostly sports. I had a studio office in that courtyard on State called the Streets of Spain. Ken used to flop into my big easy chair, pick up a magazine, and say, ‘I only came for a minute’—then stay maybe an hour but never speak, never interrupt my work. I think he was just lonesome for someone to be with: kind of the occupational disease of the fiction writer.” Stump sometimes kept Millar company when Ken took his daily dip in the Pacific. “He used to go out in the ocean off the Biltmore Hotel and swim for a couple three miles every day, parallel to the shore. I’d sit on the sand and watch him; I wasn’t about to go into that cold chop. He’d go out in any kinda weather, except hard rain.”

  Millar sometimes invited Stump to eat at the Coral Casino, where Millar paid. Stump would reciprocate with drinks at a downtown bar. “He had a grave way about him,” Stump said, “a silent way. Very introspective. You only had to be with him for five minutes to know you were talking to a damned intelligent man. But he’d let others speak for the most part; he’d sit and observe. He studied mankind, and he remembered. I don’t think he ever went to bed at night without having contemplated a number of serious things during the day. Not just fun things, but life around him. He was curious about everything that moved. Great eye for detail. Fantastic memory. Go down to the yacht harbor with him and be looking at boats—ask him a week later and he could tell you the names of most of the boats in the harbor.”

  Stump and Millar enjoyed exploring Santa Barbara on foot. “It was really more of a village than a town then,” Stump remembered. “You could walk up and down the street and meet people you knew! Like Don Freeman; he and his wife were two of the nicest people to ever walk the earth. Freeman did children’s books, and she illustrated them. Some of ’em were national prizewinners. He did the famous one called Chuggy and the Blue Caboose. Don Freeman was the kind of a guy who’d come downtown to buy some pipe tobacco and go home with a Ping-Pong table, a surfboard, and more stuff than he could carry—have to hire a cab and have all this stuff sticking out of it; Ken thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. They w
ere good friends.”

  Santa Barbara’s population was about twenty-six thousand in 1951, roughly the same as Kitchener’s when Millar was a teenager. “Santa Barbara then was the ideal place to be,” said Stump, “if you overlooked the fact that it was snobbish as hell in some areas. I miss the seals barking at night out my bedroom window, the sound of the surf on the beach just below my house—a lotta things.” The town drew Hollywood celebrities, Stump said. “The stars liked to come because there was an unwritten law that you didn’t go up and ask for an autograph; there was sort of a Santa Barbara pride in not acting like fans. Dana Andrews took the booze cure up there. There were famous people living there too, good solid citizens: that Australian actress Judith Anderson. Barry Fitzgerald. Ronald Colman had a restaurant up there when he was doing The Halls of Ivy, a popular radio show.”

  The town’s placid facade hid a reality more lurid than city fathers liked to acknowledge, Stump said. “To show you how wild the town was, all this happened in a period of about three months: The president of the university was in New York and got picked up for soliciting a young boy. Shortly after that, the football coach was thrown in jail when they raided his apartment and found it full of electrical appliances swiped outta stores. Then the professor of criminology—this made headlines all up and down California—he was lecturing on crime in the daytime, and at night he was a sneak thief; he had a girlfriend who liked fur coats, so he’d go out and rob people’s houses. That’s the kind of a town it was, somethin’ crazy always goin’ on. But the paper’s policy was, bury it on the back page. Yeah, you have a big story like that crime professor, which made page-one headlines in the LA Times—in the News-Press, it went back with the truss ads. The people who owned the News-Press were old-timers, old Santa Barbara, reluctant to let any bad news at all creep out; it just wasn’t done. Ken and I laughed about that a lot.”