Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Certainly Millar’s frantic odyssey took the same sort of acute trajectory as Lew Archer in breaking a case: from Santa Barbara to Davis and Sacramento, to Stateline and Tahoe and Reno, to LA, to Santa Barbara, to Bishop, back to Santa Barbara to close the circle. He covered two states, and the enormous publicity he generated was at least partly responsible for Linda’s return. He’d been at his desperate best, and everyone he encountered (cops, reporters, doctors, lawyers) was moved by his devotion and grit. Millar for his part was moved by the kindness of strangers; he told Margaret’s Random House editor, “Trouble can help to solidify one’s relationship with the human race.”

  He paid a high price for those ten days. Millar’s blood pressure soared alarmingly, and he was hospitalized for two weeks in June. Doctors diagnosed severe hypertension, kidney stones, and heart damage; he’d suffered a sort of stroke. When Bob Easton saw him in the hospital, he thought Millar was about to die. But, taking nine medicines a day, Millar came back to health. He’d stopped his ocean swims when he moved up north, but he vowed to resume them. Even before he left the hospital, he was back at work, revising the Coleridge book.

  He couldn’t afford to stop writing; he was in financial straits again. His and Linda’s medical expenses were running five hundred dollars a week. Millar had to get money. He’d resolved never to deal with Hollywood agent H. N. Swanson again, but now, “on the spur of a rather desperate moment,” he called Eddie Carter of the Swanson agency and asked if any movie or TV interest could be drummed up. Several private-eye shows were on the air or in the works this year (Richard Diamond, Peter Gunn, 77 Sunset Strip, Markham, Mr. Lucky, Johnny Staccato, not to mention Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer); wouldn’t this be an ideal time for a series based on the critically acclaimed Lew Archer books? The best Carter could come up with, though, was the chance of selling some Archer short stories as one-shots to General Electric Theater. Coincidentally, an Ober agent in New York was negotiating for an Archer series with Jaemar, Bob Hope’s TV producers. The Ober people didn’t want their efforts jeopardized by Carter’s, so Millar called Carter off. When Jaemar’s offer was deemed inadequate, Millar was back where he’d started: broke and in need of cash.

  “I have to make some money writing this year,” he penned plaintively to Ivan von Auw. It seemed “almost incredible” to him that The Galton Case hadn’t even earned back its Knopf advance. He’d written the best book he could write, it had got great reviews, but no more than four thousand people had paid three dollars to read it in hardcover. It galled Millar that certain hacks earned fortunes churning out the sort of trash he once threw down the Kitchener sewer. His only way to get more money was to write more novels: for instance, the non-Archer manuscript put aside when Linda had disappeared. Millar finished it and on September 18, mailed to New York the typed text of what would be his fifteenth published book: The Ferguson Affair.

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  Mystery: You say that you’ve known detectives?

  Ross Macdonald: Over the years I’ve known detectives, yes.

  Mystery: Did you go out on investigations with them?

  Ross Macdonald: Oh yes.

  —Mystery, 1979

  THE FERGUSON AFFAIR, by Ross Macdonald (Knopf). Another insanely complicated but rationally resolved chapter in the author’s spirited history of night-town southern California—its plethora of journeyman crime (adultery, arson, blackmail, kidnapping, robbery, murder), its population of grotesques (alcoholic millionaires, degenerate starlets, giggling male nurses, psychopathic lifeguards, menopausic lunatics), and its sunbaked, drag-race, leatherette culture. Thoroughly up to standard.

  —The New Yorker, 1960

  The narrator of Macdonald’s first book without Archer in seven years was Bill Gunnarson, a young married attorney and expectant father in the city of Buenavista (not unlike Santa Teresa/Santa Barbara). Gunnarson’s court-appointed client is a nurse named Ella, accused of being part of a burglary ring. Gunnarson believes she’s essentially innocent, that fear keeps her from saying what she knows. When a pawnshop owner connected to the thieves is killed, Gunnarson investigates. He looks for Larry Gaines, a country club lifeguard whom Ella dated. Gaines was also involved with one of the club members’ wives: an ex-movie actress named Holly May who’s married to the blustering, distraught Colonel Ian Ferguson. Gunnarson and Ferguson learn Holly’s been kidnapped, apparently by the burglary ring.

  Searching for Holly May and Larry Gaines, lawyer Gunnarson proves as able as any Archer at uncovering guilty secrets and family skeletons. He caroms from Beverly Hills to the hinterlands of the Santa Ynez Valley to the equally remote (to him) Hispanic neighborhood of his own town. As Gunnarson explores Buenavista’s less privileged sector—“the wrong side of the tracts”—he finds inhabitants united by class, geography, parochial school, and ethnic pride. He’s made aware of the gulf between the city’s rich and poor, and the wall of distrust separating “the suits” from “the serfs.”

  On a private level, The Ferguson Affair reads like an apologia to the Santa Barbara sector most upset by Linda Millar’s accident and the court’s apparent refusal to “punish” her. The book pleads forgiveness for the unintended sins of the young. “Everybody’s entitled to one big mistake,” Gunnarson assures his client; he says of Ella, “Her only crime was lack of judgment.” A cop reminds Gunnarson, “You don’t judge a man by what he did in his crazy teens. You judge him by his contribution over the long hike.” So Millar wished to be judged and to have his daughter judged. A hospitalized Gunnarson almost religiously merges with the lower town’s “others” when he receives a blood transfusion from a Hispanic cop.

  The question of identity is central to this book too, and Millar draws upon his own past in reconstructing Larry Gaines’s. Here again is the suffocating, female-dominated household gripped by religiosity and teetering on hysteria. Gaines is another autobiographical fantasy of what might have become of Millar if his better nature hadn’t asserted itself.

  Colonel Ferguson, the Scots-Canadian oilman from Alberta, is a quite different imaginary persona of the author’s. Like Millar, the colonel’s an ex-school gymnast, stubborn, with a bad temper, susceptible to a gloomy view of life; a man who feels like a foreigner in southern California, and who’s further alienated through the melodramatic crisis of having a loved one disappear. The colonel sums up his feelings toward his wife with a quote from Catullus, “Odi et amo. Excrucior”: “I hate her and I love her, and I’m on the rack”—a tag that turns up in so many Ken and Margaret Millar books as to seem their personal motto. In the Fergusons’ odd sexual dynamic (the colonel may inadvertently have married his illegitimate daughter), there’s the threat of incest.

  Ferguson also stands in for Linda Millar. At the height of his despair, the colonel rams his blue Imperial into a truck, laying down two hundred feet of skid marks; when Gunnarson finds him sitting on a curb, nose bleeding, Ferguson confesses that he hit the truck deliberately in a suicide attempt.

  In the book’s small-town girls gone bad, the author imagines his daughter’s future if she’d kept keeping company with “bums.” A mother says how hard it is to manage such a child: “ ‘Have you been lapping up liquor?’ . . . She denied it and denied it. . . . I dunno, you can’t beat a girl to death. Or lock her up in her room. She would have jumped out the window anyway, that’s how wild she was. Drinking and tearing around in cars and shoplifting in the stores and probably worse.” There seems to be a lot of Linda Jane in sisters Hilda and June.

  The real-life currents shaping Millar’s story gave it the subliminal resonance of felt experience, but the “facts” were sealed into a fast book filled with fine descriptive touches. At a talent agent’s office, the occupant’s name “was tastefully printed on one of the doors in lower-case letters, like a line from a modern poem.” At sundown in the barrio, “Evening light ran in the alley like red-stained water. The berries on the Cotoneaster tree were the color of nail polish
and blood.” Gunnarson, socially ill at ease at the country club, notes, “Some kind of cooked-meat smell was emanating from the clubhouse. Prime ribs of unicorn, perhaps, or breast of phoenix under glass.” Of a driver who’s just run someone down in the road: “His eyes were headline black.” Millar included a private joke about his own headline-making hunt for Linda, having a show-biz type mock Gunnarson: “I’ve been following your adventures in the newspapers. Greatest thing since Pearl White in Plunder.” In a different sort of private gesture, Millar dedicated this book written in the quick wake of Linda’s recent trouble to someone who had helped him through some of its most desperate hours: Al Stump.

  * * *

  Millar’s strength returned in autumn; his blood pressure went back to normal, and the heart damage was reversed. “I am now one of those health bugs who swim a half-mile daily, rain or shine, and never felt better in my life,” he informed Knopf in October. Maggie joined Ken in his swimming and lost twenty pounds. Linda was well too, living in a Westwood apartment, working at a Santa Monica hospital, having psychotherapy and hoping to return to college the next year.

  Millar began a new decade by starting a new Lew Archer book (The Wycherly Woman) on January 4, 1960. When Dorothy Olding visited Santa Barbara in May, Millar took advantage of his agent’s presence to unburden himself of several things that had bothered him for years. Walking the beach with Olding, he said he felt like a poor relation on the Ober roster: undervalued and underattended. He needed to be taken more seriously—by readers, by critics, by the agents—and he needed to make some money! He’d be forty-five in December; it was close to now-or-never time. He was doing his part: writing better books (let Olding be the judge), “legitimizing” himself with serious reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle (and he hoped soon to break into a New York paper), scrambling to get his dissertation between hard covers. Now he wanted Ober to pull their weight. Olding, who handled magazine sales, could be especially helpful: Cosmopolitan hadn’t bought a novel from him in four years.

  Another gripe: Millar felt hamstrung by the ambiguous relations between Ober and their Hollywood rep. For years the Millars thought they were obliged to let H. N. Swanson peddle their work to the studios, lest they jeopardize their Ober relationship. Now the reverse seemed true: Ober’s East Coast efforts conflicted with Swanson’s, and no one was directing traffic.

  Olding took Millar’s complaints to heart. She greatly liked Ken Millar (her opinion of him soared during his hunt for Linda), and she admired his work. After reading The Wycherly Woman she wrote him, “This may seem like an odd simile, but to me your writing is like delicate porcelain or glass, bright, sharp, clear, yet inherently beautiful. In spite of the fact that your excellent mystery plotting goes on steadily, holding the reader fascinated as the sentences follow each other with an impelling rhythm so suitable to the subject matter, there are underlying cadences of beauty, dropped lightly into the paragraphs. That was what fascinated me so when I first read The Doomsters, that while you pulled the reader along with you relentlessly to the end of the mystery, still you managed to show great empathy for your people, for their tragedies and triumphs.”

  Olding and Millar grew closer. In coming years, the agent would seek both Millars’ counsel on key decisions regarding the Ober agency’s future; and Millar allowed Dorothy Olding to become an important person in his life. He paid her his highest compliment, said Herb Harker: “Ken said, ‘You can depend on Dorothy,’ in a way that made me realize that was one of the measures by which he gauged people. Because I suppose—I’m just surmising here—some of the key people in his life he’d found he could not depend on; there just seemed to be an open wound there.”

  Millar’s allies came through for him strongly in 1960, as if to make up for the nightmare of 1959. When Ferguson was published in July (with, as Millar suggested, a Boucher quote prominent on its jacket), Tony Boucher delivered a rave in the New York Times Book Review, perhaps his strongest praise yet for Macdonald; Knopf placed an ad in the New York Herald Tribune reprinting it in its entirety. And for whatever reasons—a book priced (at $3.50) and perceived as a “novel,” the coattail effect of the successful Perry Mason TV show, possibly all that publicity from Linda’s disappearance—this book with the lawyer hero sold much better than any Archer hardcover. By the end of August, seven thousand books had shipped, with ninety-five hundred in print. The Detective Book Club paid two thousand dollars for Ferguson. King Features bought newspaper serialization rights. And the book struck unexpected pay dirt on the West Coast: H. N. Swanson (supervised long-distance by von Auw) peddled film rights to The Ferguson Affair for $16,500: Millar’s first movie sale. He used the money to pay off a second mortgage (“Happy Day!”).

  There was more. Von Auw wrote Millar in mid-August with this “rather staggering piece of news”: the English house of Collins (Agatha Christie’s publisher) agreed to pay a thousand pounds each for British rights to Macdonald’s next four books; helping clinch the deal was Knopf’s ad quoting Boucher on Ferguson, which von Auw had sent to London during negotiations. Still more good news: Macdonald would be published again in France, after a tiff between rival presses had kept him out of print there for the last several years. (Less lucrative but more exotic foreign deals were also made, allowing it to be said that Macdonald’s work was available “from Finland to Japan.”) Von Auw told his client, “This begins to look like your lucky year.”

  Millar agreed it was “almost laughably good.” His new novel’s Colonel Ferguson spoke of the book of life as a giant ledger: “Your good actions and your bad actions, your good luck and your bad luck, balance out. Everything comes back to you. The whole thing works like clockwork.” It seemed this was Millar’s payback time, with the lucky turns of fate falling into place like tumblers on a winning slot machine.

  In October an invigorated Millar went with Margaret on his first trip to New York since 1946. She had a book about to be published (A Stranger in My Grave), and he’d been named a director of the Mystery Writers of America. The Millars stayed at Manhattan’s Beckman Tower and attended to business matters. Von Auw said everyone was pleased with The Wycherly Woman manuscript. After Macdonald’s good Ferguson sales, Knopf raised his Wycherly advance from $1,500 to $2,500 ($500 more than Margaret Millar was now getting from Random House). Alfred Knopf, disappointed by his son Pat’s defection from the family business to cofound Atheneum, staggered the publishing world this year by merging his firm with Bennett Cerf’s Random House, a move Millar said was as surprising “as if England had joined the European Community.”

  The Millars gave joint interviews with several New York book-page writers, chats in which Millar carried the ball with his gentle, dry wit. Maurice Dolbier of the Herald Tribune recorded this exchange regarding the Knopf-Random House merger: “ ‘Talk about togetherness!’ says Mrs. Millar. ‘We are putting,’ says Mr. Millar, ‘both our egos in one basket.’ ” Publishers Weekly reported, “The Millars do not collaborate in their writing, nor do they intend to; it would be, says Mr. Millar, ‘like trying to hitch up a unicorn and a mule. I’m the mule.’ ” To Martha MacGregor of the New York Post, Millar said, “I don’t think I write escape fiction, although it contains some escape hatches.” MacGregor showed the Millars’ differing reactions to the fare at the tony Four Seasons restaurant, with Margaret exclaiming, “ ‘Will you look at this? Tiny noodles—for four dollars I want big noodles.’ . . . Mrs. Millar ordered plain old steak. Mr. Macdonald ordered Turban of Sole Four Seasons—a dish as complicated as one of his plots. . . . Mr. Macdonald said he wished she would learn to cook Turban of Sole Four Seasons when they got back to Santa Barbara, California. Mrs. Millar said she wouldn’t, because Mr. Macdonald was on a diet and should be eating lamb chops and baked potato.” MacGregor’s piece, with the married writers’ dialogue on their life and work habits (“SHE: We live in a split level house, one part is his and the other part is mine. HE: We occasionally meet on the stairs”), was used by S. J. Perelman as the j
umping-off point for a comical New Yorker sketch about rival husband-and-wife Civil War writers in Santa Barbara; Millar claimed to be delighted with the publicity: nothing was going to faze him during this good year.

  The Millars extended their trip with a jaunt to Ontario, visiting Maggie’s father and Ken’s Canadian publisher, Jack McClelland. Millar would happily have kept traveling, but (he wrote von Auw) “Maggie’s a hard girl to keep away from home for more than two weeks at a time.” The authors were back home for John Kennedy’s November election as president, an event they greeted with joy. (“We’ll have a man in the White House who can read and write,” Margaret crowed to James Sandoe. “Yippee!”)

  There was soon more for Millar to celebrate: Cosmopolitan bought The Wycherly Woman for condensation, which meant another five thousand dollars to help pay the doctors. Olding surely had done her job for Millar this year, and the author asked his agent’s permission to dedicate The Wycherly Woman to her, “as a token of affection and with the wish that it were a better book.”

  * * *

  Millar had again drawn on recent experience in writing The Wycherly Woman, which had Lew Archer hired by a rich heir to find his missing daughter, Phoebe: a name in Greek myth, someone points out, for Diana of the hunt. This hunted girl also carries a hint of a Dreiser story, “The Lost Phoebe.” But the girl Phoebe brought most to mind for Millar was of course Linda, whose face looks at Archer dolefully from a photograph: “Her mouth was wide and straight, passionate in a kind of ingrown way. She looked like one of those sensitive girls who could grow up into beauty or into hard-faced spinsterhood. If she grew up at all.”