Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  June 1, publication date of the Book Review featuring The Goodbye Look, was the day before Ken and Margaret Millar’s thirty-first wedding anniversary, and the day before Lew Archer’s birthday. This June 1, the Sunday of the Memorial Day weekend, was also the tenth anniversary of Linda Millar’s disappearance from UC Davis.

  Several New Yorkers sent Millar advance copies of the Book Review. He wrote Ash Green, “I told Maggie I could prove I was a real pro only by working every day this week, including Memorial Day. Well, it appears I’m a real pro. Fortunately so is John Leonard, whose idea this apparently was.” To Matt Bruccoli, at work on a Macdonald bibliography, Millar said, “My publishers are agog, which is the way I like to see publishers.”

  The author recognized this signal career event and took advantage of it to state a pressing grievance. Recently he’d had a frank exchange of letters with Bantam’s Marc Jaffe about that house’s “lowest-common multiple” approach to his books: the sexual suggestiveness of Bantam’s covers, and their current tagging of Archer as “The Loner with the Lethal Gun.” (If they had to have such a tag line, Millar proposed instead “The Coolest Man in Crime”). After okaying Bantam’s bid of $12,500 for The Goodbye Look, made in the instant wake of the Times coverage, Millar told von Auw, “Booksellers and readers are constantly complaining to me that my paperbacks are not kept available. The fact is they are very hard to find, whereas competitors like John D MacDonald and Rex Stout (Stout is published by Bantam) are all over the place. One bookseller told me this week, much to my distress, that Bantam seem ‘indifferent’ to my work. $12,500 tells me otherwise, but the truth is, sales of my older books are not as good as they should be, because they are not available, and Bantam should be told this. Twenty years of work on Archer have created a situation where the paperback publishers should have strong and continuing sales for the next twenty years, if they will try for them. I mean this complaint, which is a genuine one and not just an author’s gripe—the readers and booksellers are griping to me—I mean it to be a positive statement, not a negative one. I’ve had experiences with several of the major paperback publishers, as you know—Dell, Pocket Books—and think Bantam is the best of them. I also feel we’ve climbed over a major watershed this time.”

  Giving Macdonald and Archer an extra push forward on Sunday, June 8, was a page-one review of The Goodbye Look by Ray Bradbury in the Los Angeles Times’s Calendar section. Like Goldman’s piece, Bradbury’s copy praised Macdonald’s body of work: “In these books, bruised women run away from too many men who did all the wrong things, while the men run away from themselves, not knowing what they did or how or for what secret reasons. The reasons, if found, must be buried, if uncovered must be gunshot and buried again, by earth or by bottle. Murder here is the last gasp of despair and outrage. And the worst crime of all is not to be discovered, not to be punished, ever. When was the last time you hurried into a bookstore with any great relish, any huge longing to read a fine new book, or even a good one? Here’s your chance to examine, simultaneously, the output of one of our best writers. Buy both the Instant Enemy, and The Goodbye Look. Make your own comparison of Ross Macdonald, excellent and good-to-excellent. Argue me. I could be wrong. Out of 15 of his books I have read, 13 have been very fine. That’s a fantastic average. And his end is nowhere in sight.” The Bradbury piece was assigned by book editor Digby Diehl and given top placement by arts editor Charles Champlin, unofficial West Coast members of the Macdonald conspiracy.

  Ross Macdonald’s oldest coconspirator, Alfred Knopf, reached into the past for a way to put his own stamp on the moment. The publisher revived a gimmick first used by reviewer Heywood Broun in 1920, when Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street was all the rage. “Heywood Broun had a considerable following,” Knopf said. “Indeed, I remember that when we published Floyd Dell’s first novel, Moon-Calf, it sold very modestly until Broun printed something like—I can’t remember the precise words, but this is about what he said: ‘Read Moon-Calf by Floyd Dell; yes, even Main Street can wait.’ And Moon-Calf was on its way.” Now, with Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada climbing booksellers’ lists, Knopf personally drafted a bold third-of-a-page ad to run in the New York Times this lucky Friday the thirteenth; it read:

  The New York Times

  has just called the novels of

  Ross Macdonald

  “the finest detective novels

  ever written by an American.”

  His new one is

  The Goodbye

  Look.

  It has just arrived

  at bookstores all over the

  country. Price $4.95.

  Buy it now. (Ada can wait.)

  Millar thought Knopf’s ad “absolutely perfect.” Its hidden reference to Sinclair Lewis, whom the Millars had once met, made him feel, he said, “in a light way, like a member of literary history.” Millar admitted to Green, “I’m getting an enormous charge out of the various favorable developments.”

  The next happy jolt came on June 27, in a telegram from Green: YOU ARE NUMBER TEN ON NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER LIST JULY 6 WE THINK ITS TERRIFIC. Publishers Weekly put the book number nine on its fiction list. Knopf ordered a second printing of The Goodbye Look, with Goldman’s quotable claim (“The finest detective novels ever written by an American”) stamped right on its jacket; a third printing in July brought copies to twenty-two thousand—“It’s more than I’d hoped for,” Millar told Green. He thought the book might last another week or two on the charts at best, but The Goodbye Look wouldn’t leave. By the end of July it had sold twenty-two thousand, usually not enough to make a best-seller, Green said, but the lists were skewed by sales in New York and LA, where Look did especially well. Bradbury’s rave had been as important in its way as Goldman’s.

  Novels above The Goodbye Look on this summer’s best-seller list included Jacqueline Susann’s The Love Machine, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Nabokov’s Ada, Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (also a Knopf title), and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The first week in August, its fifth week on the Times list, Macdonald’s novel went to eight, slipping past Vonnegut; it was six on Publishers Weekly’s chart. “Well,” Millar understated to Green, “these are interesting times.”

  With his writers’ lunch cronies he was modestly low-key, murmuring, “Pretty good for an old mystery writer.” In letters to the agents he let his happiness show, telling Olding, “I’ve decided to postpone writing [a new book] until the excitement dies down. I mean my excitement about the current breakthrough which I’ve always hoped for, and, indeed, expected.” To von Auw he marveled, “Eighth place on the Time magazine best-seller list. Who’d have believed it?”

  Time magazine’s own unnamed reviewer had trouble accepting Macdonald’s new status and lambasted Goldman and Macdonald while trashing The Goodbye Look. Bruce Cook in a National Observer column (“Can ‘Fun’ Be ‘Serious’?”) summarized the controversy: “What Mr. Goldman is saying, basically, is that a piece of fiction written in a form usually taken as entertainment can nevertheless be taken seriously as art and judged by the same standards used to judge all fiction. The anonymous Time reviewer, on the other hand, is saying that such genre fiction cannot be art and that those who write it had darned well better remember that, rather than cluttering up their entertainments with a lot of pretentious superfluities.” For his part, Cook argued that genre fiction was usually more interesting, intelligent, and better crafted than “real” novels: “It is usually those who care least about art who talk most about it and are determined to uphold its standards.”

  Millar didn’t at all mind the brouhaha and thought it could only help sales. In fact his book went up to seven on Time’s own list; in mid-August it was also seven on the New York Times chart. “I do want to tell you how absolutely delighted, though by no means surprised, I am by the extraordinary success of The Goodbye Look,” Alfred Knopf wrote Millar. “I can think of no one who deserves success more than you.” Knopf
ordered two more printings in August. The waves Macdonald was making in the States caused ripples in remote corners of the globe. From Czechoslovakia came a request to print an eighty-thousand-copy edition of The Ivory Grin. Millar’s agents got wind of an unauthorized Greek newspaper serialization of The Goodbye Look—good news despite being illegal, an Ober rep noted: “The Greeks only pirate first-class stuff.”

  In the United States, the Doubleday Mystery Guild agreed to do a second Macdonald anthology, Archer at Large (The Galton Case, The Chill, Black Money), for which Millar wrote another discreetly autobiographical preface. And Bantam came through for Macdonald in a big way, with successful negotiations that brought ten more books (including the Dodd, Mead spy thrillers) into Bantam’s catalog. Thanks to this good backlog news and the current book’s sales, Millar wrote UC Irvine librarian John Smith, “We have ceased wondering what we’ll live on in our old age, if any.”

  The Goodbye Look had a solid run of fourteen weeks on the New York Times top ten, slipping off the best-seller list in mid-October after eight pressings and forty-five thousand copies in print. (The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly listed the novel until November.) Millar honestly didn’t mind seeing his book leave the lists: its “comparative obscurity” as an ex-best-seller would make it easier for him to write the next novel, he told Green. Much as he enjoyed the rush of business, The Goodbye Look’s three and a half months in the spotlight had drawn attention to its author in ways he wasn’t used to and didn’t like. Millar turned down a request to be on Dick Cavett’s prime-time ABC-TV show (which he watched). “I really can’t,” he apologized to Bantam’s publicity people and to von Auw, saying it had to do with “the externalization of the self and a writer’s loss of keen interest in his work when he’s over-exposed. I prefer to err in the direction of under-exposure.” (It was hard to imagine Millar, with his long pauses and careful responses, adapting comfortably to the give-and-take of a talk show. Perhaps he also realized he couldn’t deflect unwanted personal questions on live TV as he could with sympathetic print journalists.)

  And, though he was briefly tempted, Millar said no to two bids for Macdonald to cover the grisly Sharon Tate murders: one from Life magazine, the second a Harcourt book offer with a fifty-thousand-dollar advance. “To cover it even adequately would take a year’s work by a skilled investigative reporter,” he explained, “which I am not. Besides that, I’d have to cover several trials, probably stretching out indefinitely, and would have to live in L.A. to cover them. I have no desire to do so. Nor would I have any assurance of a successful book.” Better to stay in Santa Barbara, he decided, where he had another Archer under way by year’s end and where his wife was finishing a book of her own (Beyond This Point Are Monsters—his title).

  Millar took special care of Maggie’s feelings during his season of sudden good fortune. He left loving notes for her around the house (“Good morning, heartmate!” read one, a sweet variation on Billie Holiday’s “Good Morning Heartache”), went with her on out-of-state bird-watching trips or sent her cheerfully off without him, kept guard over her career with private letters to the agents (“Don’t bother answering this item,” he wrote Olding in November after learning that Maggie’s The Birds and the Beasts Were There had been allowed to lapse out of print, “she’s happily at work on a new book, and I don’t want her depressed by Random House again”).

  Writing books was the important thing, Millar felt, and he wouldn’t let his and Margaret’s routines be derailed. (“Each of us likes to begin just as the other finishes,” he told Green in a homely metaphor, “so there’s one up front in the shop while the other cobbles away in the back.”) “Success” was pleasant, but he kept it in perspective. When Collin Wilcox, a new mystery-writer friend, asked cheekily of the Hope Ranch place, “So this is the house that Knopf bought, eh?” without a pause Millar replied, “No, this is the house that Bantam bought.”

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  Her enthusiasms are varied. Besides the books neatly arranged by author (Faulkner, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf) in the living-room shelves, there are others in stacks of twos and threes on tables and on an upright piano in the corner: C. M. Bowra’s Memories, 1898-1939, The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor, Dwight Macdonald’s Parodies anthology. And mysteries, which she reads late at night. She likes Dick Francis and Andrew Garve. Ross Macdonald? “Oh, yes! I’ve read all his books. I think I once wrote Ross Macdonald a fan letter, but I never mailed it. I was afraid he’d think it—icky.”

  —Walter Clemons, “Meeting Miss Welty,”

  New York Times Book Review, April 1970

  Knowing young people were a big part of Macdonald’s readership, Millar kept them in mind as he wrote new Archer stories. “Part of the enormous excitement of writing for popular audiences is that relationship with your audience,” he told some Santa Barbara City College students who interviewed him. “You have to catch it and you have to hold it.” But he didn’t court readers’ favor with a with-it style or the sort of opinionated asides that peppered John D. Macdonald’s Travis McGee tales. “I’m a bit of an environmentalist myself” was about the most the author allowed Archer on political or social matters. Lew knew reality was complex; “like a good novelist,” as Millar said approvingly of journalist J. Anthony Lukas, “he comes to no pat conclusions.”

  Young readers, though, sensed that Archer (and Macdonald) was honest and sympathetic: he knew the ropes, told the truth, and tried to help. Individuals were what mattered most to him, not politics or taste in music. While he didn’t excuse wrong behavior, he knew how hard it was for kids to grow up; and he was on their side.

  The country in 1970 was split by a generation gap, with adults railing against irresponsible youth and postadolescents saying don’t trust anyone over thirty. Several issues dividing the generations burst into expression in Santa Barbara this year in what the LA Times would call “one of the high points in radical, youthful violence in America.” Events centered at UCSB and in Isla Vista, the square-mile enclave ten miles outside the city, a sort of ghetto for university students. (“Santa Barbara’s not nearly as careful about its children as it is its palm trees,” Ping Ferry wryly said.)

  Campus resentment brewed over lots of things: the firing of a popular assistant professor, the escalating Vietnam War, arrests of young people in Isla Vista. Rallies and demonstrations often drew as many as five thousand. Bombings and arson fires occurred at school. The February arrest by sheriff’s deputies of a student on campus led to rock-throwing.

  The afternoon after that arrest, activist lawyer William Kunstler (an attorney for the 1968 Democratic National Convention’s “Chicago Seven”) spoke to a crowd (including Ken Millar) in the campus stadium. Afterward, young people milled into Isla Vista, where police in riot gear patrolled. The arrest of an ex-student for public drinking caused more rock-throwing. As evening came, a fire was set in a trash bin outside a Bank of America, and a police car was torched. Cops responded with tear gas but had to withdraw, and by midnight the bank was destroyed. The riot went on until 2:30 A.M.

  The next day a 6 P.M. curfew was imposed in Isla Vista. Governor Ronald Reagan (who hadn’t seen fit to inspect the Santa Barbara oil spill) came to town and declared a state of emergency. A hundred twenty-two students were arrested, and the National Guard was put on alert.

  There was more rioting in April. A UCSB student trying to protect the bank from further arson was shot dead by a policeman. Again in June people ran riot through Isla Vista, prompting another curfew and more arrests. The community (students included) was divided on how to respond. Millar, in an impassioned letter to the News-Press, urged restraint:

  It is neither natural nor necessary for older citizens and younger citizens to be divided into warring camps. Even if it were possible for us older citizens to win such a war, what would we be doing beating out the brains of our own posterity? The American democracy, which seemed so hopeful and promising just a few years
ago, has not yet become the sow that eats her own farrow.

  He joined forty-five other Santa Barbarans (including lawyers, teachers, doctors, a retired army major general, and an Episcopal priest) in a self-appointed Citizens Commission on Civil Disorders to hold two months of hearings (with 150 witnesses) in hopes of airing and understanding the issues and calming the city down.

  At the same time, eleven young people were indicted in Santa Barbara Superior Court on forty-five charges relating to the bank burning. Their sixteen-week criminal trial, with helmeted sheriff’s deputies guarding the courthouse corridors, was the longest to date in Santa Barbara County history. Millar attended nearly every day of it. The presiding judge was John A. Westwick, Linda’s former lawyer.

  “Westwick was pretty fair in our case,” said Bob Langfelder, one of the eleven Isla Vista defendants. Langfelder, twenty-six at the time, became acquainted with Millar. “He told me Westwick would call and tell him whenever there was some juicy case coming up. Our trial received a lot of attention, since the Bank of America had put up twenty-five thousand dollars reward. I got a crash education in the legal system. And Ken and his wife came there every day to watch. I think it was material for him, and a bit of a hobby. He was a very astute observer, detached, very reserved; you couldn’t get an opinion out of him. Somewhere in that time I started reading his books. I knew a sociology prof at UCSB who was very familiar with his work, a social psychologist fascinated with those plots of his that go back twenty, thirty years. I was at his house, and he had Macdonald’s complete works there, and that was a sort of eye-opener—and made it, you know, okay. You’re talking political? And then Archer’s so down-to-earth, and the realism appealed to me. I guess I was in a period of realism then, and Archer’s hardly your touched-up romantic.” Millar himself was hard to know, Langfelder found: “He wasn’t an engaging conversationalist. I kept being critical of the system and trying to draw him out on the police, but he wouldn’t lend himself to easy explanations. He doesn’t have Archer as the brilliant private eye versus the dumb police; he’s not into such simple stereotypes. I was trying to make this point how the police in our case weren’t even as good as he gives them credit for in his books. I mean the police and the DA made some crucial errors in our trial; they just brushed aside the standards of evidence, and I was trying to blame them. It’s funny, he wasn’t critical of them in that sense; he just listened.”