Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  * * *

  Mystery Writers of America president Kenneth Millar went to New York alone in April 1965 for the MWA annual dinner. Though Margaret’s book The Fiend was an Edgar nominee, it seemed unlikely to win over John le Carré’s bestselling The Spy Who Came In from the Cold; she stayed home to work on her bird book. (“Kick le Carré in the pants for me, right?” she said.)

  Millar’s MWA duties mostly consisted of attending the Edgars. The rest of his ten-day stay was spent doing radio and press interviews and meeting with editors. Dorothy Olding was out of the country, so Millar and Ivan von Auw attended to business. Ross Macdonald’s novel Black Money was formally accepted for publication at Knopf, and Cosmopolitan bought first serial rights to it. Bantam was also eager for another Archer: after Millar met with the firm’s Allan Barnard and Marcia Nasatir (Saul David had left Bantam for Hollywood), the paperback house bid seventy-five hundred dollars to reprint The Far Side of the Dollar, a big increase over the forty-five hundred paid for The Chill.

  But there was bad news too from Bantam: it was letting rights lapse to four earlier Macdonalds, including three (The Galton Case, The Barbarous Coast, The Doomsters) Millar thought among his best; von Auw would have to shop those elsewhere. Bantam’s decision had to do with market trends. English spy thrillers by le Carré, Fleming, Deighton, Hall, and Ambler were the rage; movie and TV screens were filled with James Bond imitators. Softcover publishers ran with the craze; even the Edgars followed suit. Few authors wrote about private eyes anymore. Macdonald was the leader of a passé form, the best of a dying breed. Bantam’s artwork for recent Macdonald books hid the fact that they featured a licensed detective; the cover and jacket copy of their edition of The Zebra-Striped Hearse didn’t mention Lew Archer at all. While their blurbs hailed Macdonald as an “old master” of mystery, Bantam was phasing his old masterpieces out of print.

  Yet Millar knew he had a growing campus readership; college students wrote him fan letters, even came to Santa Barbara to meet him. And these were the sort of readers (or he the sort of writer) who, after they read one Macdonald book, wanted to read them all. It was crucial, he felt, that all books stay available. How else could he (and his publishers) benefit from twenty years of hard work and growing literary excellence?

  It was the literary aspect of crime fiction that Macdonald stressed during his MWA presidency, emphasizing the mystery’s connection to the mainstream. In interviews he’d carefully cite Yeats or Ibsen, not Stout or Doyle. Accepting his Chill Silver Dagger from Julian Symons at the Edgar dinner, he quoted Shakespeare: “Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.” (And he did.)

  The nineteenth annual Edgar Allan Poe Awards ceremony on Friday, April 30, drew three hundred fifty MWA members and guests to the Versailles Room of the Hotel Astor. President Millar/Macdonald sat at the Knopf table with Ashbel Green and Harding Lemay and their wives, Knopf author George Harmon Coxe, Ivan von Auw, and (by Millar’s arrangement) Hank and Anna Branson, in New York for Dutton’s publication of Branson’s Civil War novel, Salisbury Plain. Millar seated Branson next to him and made a point of introducing H.C. to all who came by, including English publisher Victor Gollancz (flamboyant in a green velvet dinner jacket). Gollancz published Margaret Millar in Britain, also John le Carré (who did win the Edgar this year). By the end of the evening, staunch friend Millar had Gollancz and von Auw (Branson’s agent) huddled together in the Astor bar making terms for an English edition of Salisbury Plain.

  Millar took advantage of his presidential prerogative to critique the Edgars dinner in a letter to Michael Avallone, editor of the MWA newsletter:

  Brilliant as it was, and highly successful, it ran too long—in Victor Gollancz’ opinion, about twice too long. The old pathologist right on top of eating was unfortunate, to put it mildly, and shouldn’t have been asked. The opening remarks could and should have been speeded up (with all due love and respect for Henry Klinger et al.) and so by all means should Rex Stout’s presentation remarks. Nobody really wants or needs jokes and manufactured suspense on these occasions. On the other hand, Stout’s opening statement on the copyright law was forceful and pertinent—for me the height of the evening. Thanks to Harold Masur, who said he’d resign if we had a folksinger, we didn’t have a folksinger. But how could such an idea even come up? Who makes these suggestions and decisions? Who picked the Hotel Astor, one of the notoriously bad hotels of New York, as was proved for example by the wholly inadequate drinking arrangements? I admit the food was passable. But we’re not a Broadway crowd. Why should we use a lousy Broadway hotel? We’re not a bunch of ghouls or funeral directors, either, and the emphasis on pathology and the like should really be alleviated a little. We’re a literary crowd. Our featured speaker, if any, should be chosen for literary prowess, wit, and brevity. As the temporary titular leader of the brightest group of writers in the world, I suggest we stop presenting a mediocre image, especially on our biggest night of the year.

  There was nothing mediocre about visiting author Julian Symons. As well as being a highly regarded crime-fiction writer, Symons was a biographer, poet, editor, social historian, and critic (whose TLS mystery reviews had done much to enhance Macdonald’s British reputation). He was a man of letters, and he and Millar had immediate rapport. “Other people have said they found it difficult to get more than fifty words out of Ken,” said Symons, “but I never found him reticent. We got on extremely well.” Their only touchy moment came when Symons assumed Millar wouldn’t catch a literary reference: “I said somebody was published by ‘an English firm called Faber and Faber, I don’t suppose you’ve heard of them,’ and he said, ‘Not heard of Faber and Faber? I would have you know that I was taught by W. H. Auden.’ He was rather annoyed! I daresay it may have been the way I said it; he thought it was an example maybe of English snottiness. It later became a running joke rather; when we saw each other, the name of Faber and Faber would certainly crop up.” Symons and Millar lunched the day after the Edgars and went to the Guggenheim to view paintings by Francis Bacon. “He was so overwhelmed by them,” Symons said, “that he didn’t really want to look at anything else—which is not to say that he loved them exactly, but he was very strongly moved by them. I was not so much moved.”

  Paintings and plays were what Millar wanted from New York, not shoptalk with mystery writers. Roped into a Saturday-night party with other MWA members at Harper and Row editor Joan Kahn’s apartment, Millar ducked out early by getting agent Bob Lescher (whom he’d befriended at a 1958 Seattle writers’ conference) to show up and give him an excuse to leave. Lescher and Millar took a long walk south from East Thirty-sixth Street nearly to the Bowery. “Ken was very observant during this walk,” Lescher noted, “and there was a compassion that almost emanated from him. We’d come upon somebody who was maybe shivering in the cold; I don’t know that they called them homeless in those days, but some person having trouble and looking for a handout, and Ken would not only stop and do that but would inquire of that person. It wasn’t condescending and it wasn’t some kind of performance, it was simply the act of a man who seemed to have a connection with all kinds of people from all walks of life; and this was the quality in Ken that I found it possible to commune with. I liked him immensely.”

  As usual Millar had insomnia in Manhattan. A Knopf publicity woman assured him it wasn’t apparent when he did a radio interview at WNBC: “Your weariness came over the air as relaxation.” Millar at nearly fifty was in excellent physical trim. (Anna Branson wrote him, “We were talking with the girls about how well you looked and [twenty-four-year-old] Annie’s comment was ‘Yum, yum,’ which says a hell of a lot more than just saying you look fit.”) He’d come to terms with himself and with his career. Years ago, hard-pressed to pay bills, he’d resented those who earned fortunes writing trash; but his envy had faded. He was happy making a living writing what he liked, and he felt on the brink of a new stage in his fiction. “I think somebody said Yeats was
an old man mad about writing,” Millar told the New York Post’s Martha MacGregor over a Miller High Life at the Algonquin. “That’s what I hope to grow up into eventually. Everything else falls away, people, everything. It’s like a tontine, a moral and imaginative tontine. You have to live through three generations of yourself before you inherit the wealth.”

  He took special pleasure from his enduring relationship with Alfred Knopf, who at seventy-three was easing away from his duties at the firm he’d founded in the year of Millar’s birth. By Knopf’s decree, Ross Macdonald became editor Ash Green’s “client” now, though Macdonald had never needed an editor: it was always just Alfred, in itself a compliment. Knopf too seemed pleased with Macdonald’s career, though he fretted over Millar’s election as president of the Mystery Writers of America: “Quite obviously this nails you down even tighter in the category of writers that you have for so long been trying to escape, efforts that I have wholeheartedly aided and abetted.” Knopf told his well-reviewed author, “Someday I hope sales will catch up with the critics.” But he thought the firm had pushed Macdonald to a plateau of at least moderate respectability (around seven thousand). He liked The Far Side of the Dollar so much he delayed its publication six months so as to include it in Knopf’s high-profile fiftieth-anniversary list; Millar responded by dedicating the book “to Alfred,” a gesture the old man said pleased and touched him.

  Knopf and Millar lunched together Monday, May 3, and walked back to Alfred’s office, where Knopf inscribed a copy of H. L. Mencken’s American Scene to Ken Millar, “an old friend.” While Millar sat across from him, Knopf picked up his Leica and snapped several pictures, one of which (at Millar’s insistence) would be the author photo for Ross Macdonald’s next six books. It was among the best likenesses he’d ever captured, Knopf later said: Millar, half-smiling, head tipped at a confident but not arrogant angle, affection in his unblinking gaze; it’s a glance that asks for attention and gets it. He looked like a proud son.

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  Edward read two books he had already read. He didn’t remember that he had read them until he reached the last page of each. Then he read four paperback mysteries by Ross Macdonald. They were excellent.

  —Donald Barthelme, “Edward and Pia,” The New Yorker, September 1965

  I read Black Money over the weekend and think it is a very fine job indeed. It would be hard to improve on the plotting or characterizations. You know I represented Raymond Chandler all of his writing life and I’m sincere in saying that you have explored even farther into that mysterious twilight of suspense.

  —H. N. Swanson to Ken Millar, September 1965

  Lew Archer, with his office on the Sunset Strip, had many dealings in Hollywood; he counted movie people among his friends, clients, enemies, and romances. The motion pictures he’d seen as a kid (specifically, the “Inspector Fate of Limehouse” series) helped decide him to be first a cop and then a private detective. He still went to movies (continuing a “lover’s quarrel” with them, as Macdonald put it), as shown by a wisecrack in The Doomsters: “I’m trying to sell the movie rights to my life. Somebody down here hates me.” The joke referred to a 1956 film, Somebody Up There Likes Me, in which young Paul Newman played boxer Rocky Graziano.

  William Goldman, born in Chicago and schooled in New York, probably chuckled over Lew’s joke in 1959 when The Doomsters came out in paperback. Goldman mostly read Macdonald in softcover, he wrote: “I had been a lunatic Archer fan since 1950, when I picked up John Macdonald’s The Moving Target from a crummy book rack in the equally crummy bus station in Elyria, Ohio.” Goldman was hooked on Macdonald and other hard-boiled writers when he served in a Pentagon-based army unit in the last months of the Korean War. “I was a big big reader in those days,” he said, “and it seemed to me that Hammett and Chandler were extraordinary novelists; but they weren’t in those days thought of as such. They were thought of as wonderful writers ‘in that tradition.’ But I remember thinking I didn’t see why they weren’t in it with the other people, working the same side of the street. I thought The Maltese Falcon was the best of anything. Except I thought Chandler was the much better writer. And then I thought Macdonald was the best of them all.”

  One other man in Goldman’s army unit shared his tastes: a Michigan fellow named R. W. Lid, who was also reading a lot of hard-boiled fiction then. The two soldiers regularly loaded up on Chandler, Hammett, and Macdonald paperbacks from the post library. Dick Lid later went into teaching, which took him in time to Santa Barbara, where he became friends with Millar/Macdonald, who in 1964 dedicated The Chill to him, a book Goldman would declare “one of the best novels of the twentieth century.”

  By 1964, Goldman was a popular novelist himself, whose books (Boys and Girls Together) sold a great many Bantam paperbacks. New Yorker Goldman now wanted to write movies and was talking possible projects with producer Elliott Kastner. “Kastner had just seen a movie called The Professionals,” Goldman said, “a western with Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin. He said, ‘I want to do a picture like that, I want to do a picture with balls.’ I said, ‘Read some Ross Macdonald.’ He said, ‘I’ll read some over the weekend.’ He called me Monday and said, ‘I love it, I want to do one.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’ll find one, and you option it.’ Like an idiot I started with whatever the current one was”—The Chill—“and reread them all going back, and of course coming to the first one, The Moving Target, which was the most cinematic, if you will; he got less cinematic as he went on. And I thought, ‘Maybe I could make a movie of this.’ I was very new at screen-writing—like, totally new. So Kastner optioned The Moving Target, and I wrote the screenplay. And my memory is that he took it first to Frank Sinatra, and Sinatra passed. Then he heard that Newman was interested.” Paul Newman in 1964 was one of the world’s most bankable film stars. “Newman was in Europe making a not very successful costume movie called Lady L,” Goldman went on. “Kastner went over for a meeting, and eventually Newman agreed to do it. I met with him in Connecticut when he was done with Lady L, and then at some point I went to California.”

  The first Millar learned of any of this was the night of May 13, 1965, a week after his New York trip. He got a phone call from the fellow who’d optioned Target months ago through H. N. Swanson, informing him that Warner Bros, was about to begin making a big-budget film of the Archer book, starring Paul Newman. Lew Archer’s wry eight-year-old joke had come true.

  Millar was quick to seize the moment. The next day he dashed off a letter to von Auw urging the agent use this news to make Bantam change its mind about dropping all those Archer titles: “This should strengthen our bargaining position, don’t you think?” The author’s eventual goal was to have all his books with the same paperback house, making it easier for all concerned to get the most out of Macdonald: “I have observed that the writers in my field e.g. Brett Halliday who do well in paperback generally stay with one house. I realize this isn’t always possible, but it is what I aim at, and I’m not getting any younger.” He insisted, “I believe my backlist is absolutely certain to appreciate with time.” Millar suggested von Auw contact Marcia Nasatir, the Bantam editor “who seems to understand that I’m not just an Erie Stanley Gardner who failed to make the grade.”

  But a hitch developed at Warners. The studio people were already so high on this unmade project they were thinking of doing a series of Lew Archer movies, as United Artists had done with the James Bond films. Before making Target, they wanted to secure exclusive rights to Archer. Millar wasn’t giving those away; he thought fifty thousand dollars was a fair asking sum—and he was adamant, he told von Auw: “I’d much rather see the deal fall through than risk having Archer lost in the clutches of the Warners octopus. . . . I say nuts.” Warners wasn’t willing to pay Millar’s price. The studio’s solution: use the book Kastner owned but not its title, and change the detective’s name. Goldman was asked to rename the hero. “I came up with ‘Harper,’ ” he said,
“because it was almost the same: Lew Harper, Lew Archer.” Thus the film became Harper. Newman’s wife, Joanne Woodward, later claimed on the Tonight Show that Archer’s name was changed because Newman had had two hits (Hud, The Hustler) with H titles. Goldman’s response: “If you know anything about the movie business, you know it’s all bullshit.”

  Blessings are always mixed, Millar mused. He was disappointed by the name change, but he saw the bright side: if the movie was successful, it was bound to help his novel sales. This film would come out right after Black Money. “It’s my best book,” he wrote Olding, “and the timing couldn’t be better.” He suggested that Pocket Books (who were reissuing their five Macdonald titles, including The Moving Target) be reminded to capitalize on the movie; maybe his English publisher, Collins, might want to do something special with Target too.

  Millar stepped up his letter-writing in July when he heard from Goldman how well shooting was going in Burbank. Bantam’s decision to drop half its Archers seemed especially shortsighted now, and Millar didn’t even know Pocket Books’ plans. “Knopf never tells me anything about reprint deals,” he complained to Olding, “although they are obviously central to my living.” With von Auw on vacation in North Africa, Millar took the unprecedented step of broaching business directly to Alfred Knopf. His career was at a turning point, author wrote publisher, and Bantam had made a mistake; couldn’t Knopf’s people get them to fix it? “If Bantam drop half their Archers and I have to go to a third house, I shall be permanently fragmented indeed, just when I should have a reasonable expectation of making some money for myself and everyone concerned.” While he was at it, Millar asked Knopf for “what I would most like to see, in the twentieth year of our partnership”: an omnibus (like ones Knopf had done of Hammett, Chandler, and others) of Archer novels “which got scant attention and fairly scanter sales when they first came out.” For inclusion he nominated The Moving Target, The Ivory Grin, “and either The Galton Case or The Way Some People Die,” all four of which, the writer said, “are classics in the genre and known as such.”