by Tom Nolan
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The number of mystery writers who may also be called “novelists”—that is, who traffic more than perfunctorily in such matters as character and social comment—may still, unhappily, be counted on the fingers of one hand. Ross Macdonald, Georges Simenon, and . . . ?
—Clifford A. Ridley, National Observer, 1968
I have a passion for Dickens and for memoirs of the era of 30 or 40 years ago—the Strachey epoch. I love Jane Austen, a book you can move straight into the middle of. I like the California school of mystery—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald.
—Elizabeth Bowen, Washington Post, 1968
Millar was convinced that his literary ancestor Coleridge, so wise to the trends of his own and later times, had to have been “some sort of a seer.” Millar himself seemed to have a touch of the prophet: after traveling to Europe in 1936, he was sure the world was due for war. A few years later, doing naval service off Formosa in the global conflict he’d predicted, he glimpsed another awful possibility, as he recalled to Ping Ferry: “I foresaw with a sudden pang the danger of American garrisons on the Asian mainland, and started talking about it.” He’d talk a lot more in the late sixties and early seventies, as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon sent the United States down a jungle path to a bloody war that Millar thought “an unmitigated disaster.”
The war began affecting Millar’s civic life in 1965, when he told Dorothy Olding, “I’m in a bitter struggle for the future of the Democratic Party here (liberal or Vietnam).” (His forceful arguments caused one member of Santa Barbara’s Democratic League to resign angrily from that body.) At the end of 1965, when it seemed there was a chance for peace in Asia, Millar wrote Ivan von Auw, “If they really do suspend hostilities in Vietnam I won’t be able to think of anything to complain about.” That didn’t happen, though; and on his next birthday he told Alfred Knopf, “I have a book going”—The Instant Enemy—“and feel fine personally, but not too darn good about the country.”
In 1967, Ross Macdonald started getting fan mail from GIs in Vietnam, and from wounded servicemen in stateside hospitals. “It feels to me like a season of apocalypse,” Millar worried to Olding, “perhaps the one that will make or break us if we’re not already broken.” To the Bransons he said, “The country is going to hell as I was always afraid it was going to.” The violent clamp-down on antiwar demonstrators reminded him of scenes he’d witnessed in fascist Europe. “I’m a bit scared of 1968,” he confessed to Michael Avallone. “I don’t expect to live forever, but I hope the republic will.”
Millar made his views known through letters to the local paper and at the writers’ luncheons, which were attended by several News-Press staff. As the war escalated, the Millars took their concern to the Santa Barbara streets, marching with hundreds of others in peace rallies, cheering speakers like Dr. Benjamin Spock. Millar often kept silent afternoon vigil with a few other mute protesters on a downtown street corner. As more dissenters felt the crack of police batons, his outrage smoldered. “It got to the point,” he said later, “where people who were opposed to the most terrible and useless war in our history were considered war criminals, instead of the people who were doing it. And yet, there it was. People were being put in jail for protesting. They were even being shot, as at Kent State. You couldn’t even stand on the corner down in front of the Art Museum as some of us did, periodically, for a number of years during that war, without having your picture taken every week or so by the CIA.” One day a cherry bomb blew up the Millars’ mailbox: no way to know if it was because of Ken Millar’s frequent protest letters to the News-Press, which printed them with his address.
Vietnam clouded what were otherwise sunny years for Millar, but he made sure it didn’t jeopardize friendships. He and Bob Easton had an unspoken understanding they wouldn’t discuss the war. And Millar appreciated the complex issues and options Vietnam forced on young people. “I won’t say I’m sorry that you’re planning to enlist,” he wrote a college-age correspondent in 1968. “My sorrow is for the war in all its meanings. But it’s possible to feel pride in the conduct of other men in relation to a war which one abhors.” (A few years later though he wrote the same correspondent, “It makes me angry to think of what good young men have suffered for bad old men.”)
Macdonald was a sympathetic figure to many young readers during these times. The author whose Archer dealt squarely with troubled young folk seemed likely to be understanding in real life. Herb Harker said Millar was often called on for counsel by friends’ teens: “He was so completely down-to-earth and genuine that the toughest kid couldn’t talk to him without knowing this guy was giving him the straight goods.”
Even at the Coral Casino pool, Millar paid close attention to youngsters and was quick to give aid. People magazine writer Brad Darrach witnessed this episode:
A small, anxious boy is pushing with all his might at the door of a cabana in an exclusive Santa Barbara beach club. Inside the cabana, two larger boys are holding the door shut. On his way to the pool, Millar pauses.
“Please let me in! Please!” the outsider wails. His tormentors giggle.
Millar leans against the cabana door. With a cry of relief, the boy darts in. Millar rolls his eyes at the other two. “I thought there must be six boys in here!” he says.
The compliment softens it, but the rebuke is felt. As Millar leaves, the three boys begin to play together quietly.
“Why did you do that?” Millar is asked.
“That boy needs help,” he answers with flat force. “I’ve known him since he was born.”
Ross Macdonald seemed one of those writers J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield spoke of, the kind you want to be friends with, once you’ve read their books. Many readers (generally young, usually male) wrote Macdonald and even telephoned him during the sixties and seventies. One was New York journalist Paul Nelson:
Close to explosion in the winter of 1970, I had just finished the latest Ross Macdonald book in print. Perhaps that’s why I committed an act of no small desperation and guilt. I reached out for at least the shadows of answers from the creator of private investigator Lew Archer, who, like Jean Renoir, knows that the real tragedy in life is that everyone has his reasons. My own existence was certainly a mystery in which the psychic murders seemed to keep piling up. I guess I felt like somebody in one of Millar’s novels—those books to which, with hope, I clung—and badly needed a share of the understanding and compassion he’d shown his characters.
Other contacts began less dramatically. William Ruehlmann wrote Millar a fan letter from Washington, D.C., in 1965. “As a teenager, I discovered him in used Bantam paperbacks,” Ruehlmann said. “I think the first one I read—I was attracted by the title—was The Doomsters. And of course once you start reading him, you say, ‘Well, now, this is not only on the thriller level; there’s something else here.’ Even as a teenager I knew that: it was the wonderful craft of his prose. I was interested I suppose because his books were of the hard-boiled school, which I found stylistically fascinating; but also because in books like The Galton Case he seemed to understand troubled teenagers, and I fell into that category. I think every American kid does at one time or another. When I got to college, I wrote and told him I liked his work a lot. Lo and behold he sent me a letter in return, and it was the basis of a long correspondence.”
In the summer of 1968, the twenty-three-year-old Ruehlmann, after driving across the country with his army enlistee brother, paid a call on Millar. All his good perceptions about Macdonald were confirmed, Ruehlmann said:
I met Ken in the morning. As was his custom, he took me on one of those long walks. We went down to the botanical gardens there, with his German shepherd dog Brandy, whom he called Lew. Like Ken, Brandy was proud and loyal: gentle but dangerous to cross. Ken seemed on the surface shy, but one to one he was very open. He was sweet and kind, but he was so withdrawing in many ways; he was more interested in the o
ther person than he was in asserting himself. He must have been a wonderful teacher. There was no generation gap with Ken. The unnerving quality was that he would think before he spoke; and when he did speak, no matter how casually, it was as if the words had been crafted and written and he was reading them to you. The precision of his language, the unaffected grace of it—it made one say to oneself, “Gee, I oughta think more about what I say.”
He had the amiability of a man who’d made terms with life and wasn’t afraid of it—and wasn’t taking out any particular kind of revenge on it, who really was inclined to conserve it. I remember standing beside the aviary there in Santa Barbara; there were these wild birds inside the cage, rare creatures. Ken turned to me and said, “You know, I know the keeper here; I know these birds are very well taken care of. But if it were up to me, I’d let them all go.” What interested me about Ken was that he was a scholarly man who believed in the act of life. He was a democratic man with his sensibilities inclined towards the underdog, because he’d been one and he understood them. He hadn’t been crushed and spoiled and turned cynical by it; he’d surmounted it. Ken had plenty of problems, but he managed them. And for that reason he was always on the side of whoever was on the outs.
He was a stubbornly ethical man. He believed strongly in personal integrity. The thing about it, though: he knew the limitations of Hemingway, and he wasn’t that kind of a fellow. That’s the difference. Archer may throw a punch, but with some diffidence afterwards: perhaps it wasn’t the right thing. Other people’s heroes will throw a punch and have a damn good time doing it. Archer was more complex. Ken was more complex; his work was more complex.
He was quite convinced he was doing important work, and that it counted. One of the things he said to me on the beach that I well remember—it was an offhand statement, it wasn’t a brag—he simply said, “I know my work will be read in a hundred years.” And indeed it will. He had the confidence of knowing that his work was good; he didn’t have to worry about anyone’s particular opinion, although he was gratified to get good ones now and then.
I was very aware this was a working writer who was very disciplined, serious about his schedule; so was Margaret. But I was with one or both of them from the moment I entered their house until the end of the day. After lunch at the Copper Coffee Pot, we went back to their house and talked. I remember the sun going down, and we’re sitting there talking in the dark in their living room, about everything from—’68 was a tumultuous political year—everything from Norman Mailer to H. L. Mencken’s American Language. It was a heady experience for me. I suspect Ken was not in favor of the war, but because at the time there were a lot of entangling matters, rather than give offense Ken would simply not talk about it.
There was no meanness in him, and there was an instinctive sympathy. I saw it at work. I never heard an unkind word said about Ken from anyone; nor have I read any. I regarded him as a kind of father figure, no question. I never got along with my own father as well as I got along with Ken, as remote as he was physically. I think there may have been a lot of things: Ken never had a son, and I think I kind of fit into that role at a time when it just seemed suitable. I like to think he was as fond of me as I was of him. Certainly gave me every evidence that he was. I kind of felt he and Margaret were loving parents, once removed.
They were two extraordinary people: affectionate, mutually caring, bright. Their conversation was sharp, full of wit and the kind of understanding that goes with a couple that knows each other so well they probably know what the other one’s thinking and can get a friendly dig in. It was cocktail hour. “Oh, you want one of those,” she’d say. “Is it time for one of those?” Ken said, “Absolutely.” And she walked over to the refrigerator and brought out: a Fudgsicle. This was Ken’s “one of those.”
I suspect Margaret might have been even tougher than Ken, in many ways; her work can be tougher. These were enormously clever, well-read people. They didn’t take each other for granted, and they didn’t take their world for granted. There was nothing wishy-washy about their goodness. They gave you something to shoot for, it seemed to me. So I traveled back across the country with a kind of cemented feeling that all the instincts I’d had about the caliber of this man went beyond his work and were absolutely true. The ethical element in the morality plays he wrote, the hard-boiled school he tempered, was very much a part of his rather courtly manner and way of life. Ken was his work, his work was Ken. He was such a wonderful man, quite aside from the fact that he was a wonderful writer. He was a wonderful man.
Despite disturbing events at home and abroad and the threat of more to come (“Did you know,” Millar asked Olding, “that the government is planning atomic power plants every twenty miles along the California coast from San Diego to 100 miles north of Santa Barbara?”), so many good things were happening for Millar/Macdonald in 1968 that he confessed to feeling unusually sanguine. He wished the war were over, he wrote Olding, but, “still these are precious days.” In a summer filled with fiction writing, ocean swimming, and court-watching with Maggie (five “classic” murder trials running simultaneously), Millar told von Auw, “I’ve slowed down enough to look back once or twice and realize what an incredibly lucky life I’ve been leading.”
Macdonald’s The Instant Enemy got splendid reviews (including one by Clare Boothe Luce in New York magazine, and one in the daily New York Times) and sold over ten thousand copies. Margaret Millar’s nonfiction work about bird-watching went into a third printing. “We are living on the income from books alone again,” Millar told Harris Seed, “comparatively poor but absolutely happy.”
He thought Lew Archer (“my only assured source of income”) was “now at the peak of his earning power, however modest.” Archer’s international profile rose interestingly in 1968: The Barbarous Coast was published in Romania (as was Margaret’s Vanish in an Instant), there was a Czech edition of The Zebra-Striped Hearse, and Macdonald was interviewed for Swedish radio. There were also encouraging developments closer to home. Professor Matthew J. Bruccoli, rising scholar of American literature, started compiling a Ross Macdonald bibliographical checklist similar to one he’d recently done on Raymond Chandler. The chancellor of UC Irvine offered Millar a one-week Regents’ Lectureship, which pleased him greatly (though he declined in order to finish a book). And Macdonald was asked to work on a script for Alfred Hitchcock.
The Hitchcock bid (which Millar also declined) may have come about in part through Anthony Boucher: “Hitch” was said to be a regular reader of Boucher’s column and couldn’t have missed the critic’s annual raves about Macdonald. In early 1968, for instance, Boucher hailed The Instant Enemy as “an extraordinary performance.” A month after writing that, the fifty-six-year-old Boucher, a longtime pipe smoker, died of lung cancer. When Millar phoned Boucher’s widow, Phyllis White, he said something that impressed and comforted her: “There are a couple of hundred of us working in the ambience that he created.”
Millar was establishing his own supportive ambience, through his unpublicized editorial and promotional work on behalf of several younger writers. One of these, Dennis Lynds, this spring won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel with Act of Fear, the book Millar had recommended to Dodd, Mead.
A future Edgar winner, Joe Gores, said he’d been inspired by Macdonald’s 1955 book The Name Is Archer to become first a private detective and then a crime writer. In mid-1968, Joe Gores induced Millar to attend a San Francisco meeting of the northern California MWA chapter, where Millar read aloud a just-written essay, “A Preface to The Galton Case.” (The commissioning of this piece for a book in which Macdonald kept company with mainstream authors including Reynolds Price, Truman Capote, Wright Morris, and John Fowles was another benchmark in his career, he felt.)
If Macdonald’s talent was beginning to be acknowledged outside his genre, his reputation within the detective-fiction world at this time was formidable, said Gores: “Close to godhead, among people who liked hard-boiled. Certainly on
the steps of the pantheon.” Gores found Millar in person to be extremely self-contained: “He watched. You know how he had that philosophy about Archer—that he should be thin as a sheet of paper and that if he turned sideways you wouldn’t see him? He sorta went through life that way—no leather patches on the elbows, you know?” Phyllis White recalled watching Millar answer audience questions at a later Bay Area MWA meet: “I felt that Ken was very hard to know, that he was always standing a long way back from the facade. I said something to Joe Gores about that, and Joe said to me, ‘He’s a Chinese box!’ ”
During his 1968 Bay Area trip, Millar had Gores drive him to the bird-banding station above Point Bolinas where, though they’d never met him, the personnel greeted Millar warmly; they knew all about him: not as a fiction writer, but for his work on behalf of condors. On the drive back, Millar returned to Ross Macdonald mode, quizzing Gores about auto “repo” men as material for a new Archer novel.
The Goodbye Look would be that new book’s name, and Millar had a very good feeling about it. “I seem to be moving further in the direction of the ‘mainstream novel,’ ” he wrote Ash Green, “a development which is deeply satisfying to me.” Even though he thought Archer now at the peak of his earning power, Millar the sometime seer had a sort of premonition there might be more exciting things in store. He told Alfred Knopf, “I feel as if I’m turning a corner but don’t know the name of the street. I like it, though.” Done with The Goodbye Look in September, Millar informed Green with modest pride and prescience, “I’m keen on this book, and venture to think it’s my largest effort yet—certainly the one least likely to have been written by anyone else. If your firm agrees, this would be the book on which to make a somewhat more ambitious presentation, I believe.”
