Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  As usual Millar was in New York alone; Maggie still refused to go there. But she joined him later in Ontario, where they visited relatives, including her father, now in a Kitchener home for the blind. They also spent time in Toronto and Peterborough (where Hugh Kenner and Robertson Davies hailed from). In Peterborough, Millar called twenty-one-year-old university student Linwood Barclay, a new correspondent who’d sent him a novel manuscript, and invited him to dinner with Margaret’s Peterborough kin.

  “We talked a bit about his roots,” said Barclay, later an editor at the Toronto Star. “He seemed very interested in me, and I think he must have been that way with most people. He seemed to pay such attention, as opposed to so many people who are waiting for a lull so that they can start talking. He was very open, very quiet, very gentle: almost fatherly, I guess, in a sort of way. I’d lost my father when I was sixteen, and I felt drawn towards other figures who were about my father’s age at the time; and he seemed like a particularly nice one. I was so impressed at the time he took to answer my letters! Here I am just some young college student, and he spent so much energy reading these manuscripts I had written and commenting on them—which really I guess amazed me. I started reading him when I was in high school, probably with The Chill. You can’t imagine the thrill that it was to have someone whom you just revered call you up and be so kind and show that sort of attention. I was walking on clouds for days.” Barclay noticed something odd though during his hours with Millar: “A couple of times in the evening he seemed somewhat confused, almost like he couldn’t figure out the floor plan of the house; he couldn’t find the right door a couple of times.”

  * * *

  Returning to Santa Barbara, Millar still felt worn out. He answered piled-up correspondence and made an effort to catch up on his reading (“as if I ever could”), enjoyed the presence of his thirteen-year-old grandson (now a novice surfer), who spent the summer with the Millars, and (encouraged by Julian Symons) made plans for another trip to England and Switzerland in September, this time with Margaret: “We’re both past sixty and had better seize the day.” Maggie seemed in fine fettle, having sold her first novel in six years (Ask for Me Tomorrow) to Random House (for thirty-five hundred dollars) and already at work on another. Millar was content to keep resting.

  In June he was visited by Otto Penzler, an enterprising young editor-publisher who’d asked to do a collection of Millar’s old San Francisco Chronicle book reviews. “He was very shy,” Penzler recalled, “and so was I basically. It was difficult to maintain a conversation. So we sat in that cabana all day, looking over the beach, seeing the oil rigs out there. I guess it was about five in the afternoon when he finally said, ‘Well, let’s talk about the book. What do you want in it?’ I don’t know what made me say this, but I answered, ‘What I’d really like to do would be a book of the complete Lew Archer short stories.’ I’d just started my company, it was a very small press, I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking him to let me publish a book like that; it would have been rude and presumptuous. But I blurted that out, and he said, ‘Why, that would be all right.’ I said, ‘Oh, I don’t think we should make that kind of an agreement here, I’m sure the people at Knopf would resent it terribly.’ ‘Well, no,’ he said, ‘I don’t think they’ll mind. Why, they’ve never asked me. And you have. And I’d like you to do the book.’ I couldn’t believe it was that simple! All you had to do was ask, and he said yes?” The volume Penzler produced a year later, Lew Archer: Private Investigator, went through four printings in twelve months, was selected by the Detective Book Club, and helped launch Penzler’s Mysterious Press as an important crime-fiction imprint.

  The fourth annual Santa Barbara Writers Conference in June 1976 gave Millar another reason not to resume writing just yet. For the second year in a row, Eudora Welty came from Mississippi to take part in the eight-day event. “Fortunately for the town and us, she seems to love it,” Millar wrote Peter Wolfe, “and her presence simply elevates the atmosphere. . . . And Eudora took no money and paid her own hotel bill! That’s dedication.” Millar took Welty to a writers’ lunch, which raised some eyebrows given his usual adamant stance against women there; and he brought her to the Hope Ranch house, which irritated his wife.

  “It seems that Margaret had said she didn’t ever want anybody to come to their house,” Welty said. “This should just be their house.” (“Our home is a special island away from society,” Margaret Millar told a journalist in 1975. “We don’t encourage guests.”) “So there I was. She was nice to me, when she saw me there. On the other hand when she got mad, there wasn’t anywhere to go. It could be pretty explosive; it could be anything. I used to get very upset inside, nothing I could do about it, when she would have a temper tantrum without any cause and just blast Ken to the devil, right in public. And slam doors, she was good at that. Everybody knew it, because she did it in public all the time. But Ken would say, ‘Well, in a house with any two people, any two people, it can be like this.’

  “I was there in Ken’s house when one of the fellows who had enrolled in the Writers Conference came by with a manuscript. This was a man who was making his living in San Francisco and trying to be a writer on the side; and the whole time the man was in town he would see Ken privately and talk to him, which no one would know about except I just happened to be there. And Margaret is saying, ‘He’s trash, why do you want to fool with him?’ You know. Another time he’d told one of these people to meet him at their beach club, and Margaret was furious: ‘Why are you bringing that crumb in here?’ And every time, Ken would just back off, impervious in a way, and make whatever change it was she wanted. Well, what else could you do?

  “We were standing out in front of this restaurant they liked after dinner once, while Ken was fixing to bring the car: checking the trunk, this and that; and she just hated that he was taking so much time, that he wouldn’t just do it. She said, ‘Well, if we ever split, you’ll know why.’ Who cared? What was the big deal? But that was her way.

  “For no reason at all once she said to me, ‘When Ken is away, of course I open your letters to him, but only to see if there’s anything in them he needs to be informed about.’ I don’t know why she told me that, but—I don’t think she’d ever have found anything in any of them to give her pause.”

  Millar’s participation in the conference (for which he and other workshop leaders were paid a token hundred dollars) was typically thorough and committed. Welty watched him conduct his session: “He took a manuscript that had been sent him and just went through it carefully for the benefit of the class, to show what was good and what was a mistake. It was a very patient examination, just like an editor would give. A lot of people were bored in the audience, because they—you know, they wanted somethin’ else, I don’t know what. But it was so good of him to do that, and he made a thorough study of it.”

  Millar singled out conference participant Fred Zackel for special attention. When Ross Macdonald publicly “waxed enthusiastic” over Zackel’s “hard-boiled detective novel” in progress, it got written up in the LA Times. Millar helped Zackel greatly in the next few years, coaching and encouraging him to complete his manuscript, promoting it to Ash Green and to Harper and Row’s Joan Kahn, putting Zackel together with Dorothy Olding, and finally giving a jacket quote when Cocaine and Blue Eyes was published in 1978. (The book was eventually made into a film starring football-player-turned-actor O. J. Simpson.) Zackel (who later earned a Ph.D. and became a university professor) wrote Millar, “I went to that first Santa Barbara Writers Conference 21/2 years ago because I needed someone to tell me to quit trying to be a writer, to stop kidding myself, to say that my dream was worse than silly. I needed someone to tell me the dream had died. . . . And I thank you for stooping to help me. For knowing and caring about me. Your courtesy and gentleness and generosity were rare and strange to me. You gave a reason to me to go on. You gave me hope. Now you say I made it, that my book is a major accomplishment, that you’re delighted with me. . .
. God, how many times can I say thank you? Not nearly enough. Nowhere near enough. Thank you.”

  * * *

  Millar was critiquing manuscripts at the 1976 conference when his own twenty-fourth novel (the eighteenth Archer) was published. The Blue Hammer was the most widely reviewed Macdonald book yet, covered by many midsize-city newspapers as well as the major New York and LA dailies and magazines. From one-sentence squibs to full-page essays, most reviews were positive, and many were raves: “brilliantly conceived and woven . . . very possibly his best” (John Seagraves, Washington Star), “he has seldom been in better form” (The New Yorker), “an excellent addition to the Archer canon” (Elmer R. Pry, Chicago Tribune Book World), “one of his best” (Walter Clemons, Newsweek), “perfect blend of style and action . . . as good as the more relentlessly ‘serious’ American novelists . . . and better than most” (William McPherson, Washington Post Book World).

  Several critics perceived a maturing in Archer’s outlook. Robert Kirsch wrote in the LA Times: “Lew Archer has changed. . . . He has become mellower, more involved with other people, vulnerable to autumnal romance, even concerned now with long-range balances.” Kirsch picked up on those elements that softly echoed the first Archer book, The Moving Target. In Target, Archer fought a thug to his drowning death; faced with a similar chance in Hammer, Archer instead takes his prey into custody:

  For some reason, it became important to me that Rico shouldn’t make it into the black water. . . . As I marched Rico back to my car and got him safely inside of it, I understood one source of my satisfaction. Twenty-odd years ago, near an oil-stained pier like this, I had fought in the water with a man named Puddler and drowned him.

  Rico, whatever his sins, had served as an equalizer for one of mine.

  The affection between Archer and a younger woman reporter (“a level-eyed brunette of about thirty . . . well-shaped but rather awkward in her movements, as if she weren’t quite at home in the world”) delicately balanced the loss of his wife, Sue, first mentioned in Target. These subtle closures were what made Millar say The Blue Hammer could stand as the last Archer, “if it had to.” Kirsch read the book as a possible precursor of things to come: “The Blue Hammer may be the bridge between the older Archer novels and some new shoreline of fiction. If so, Macdonald is the writer to do it . . . a master in his own right who’s ready to explore new terrain.”

  The sour note in a near-universal chorus of praise was sounded by Anatole Broyard, who seemed to be exercising his avowed pleasure in trying to shake an established reputation. In his long Times review (in which he gave away most of the mystery’s surprises), he said:

  Some time ago, a critic writing in The New York Times called Mr. Macdonald the author of “the best detective novels ever written by an American,” and several of his books have been national best sellers. If I were to hazard an explanation of this phenomenon, I would suggest that this author is more popular than most because his mysteries are more mysterious than most. Perhaps his considerable audience is tired of the tyranny of causation. Here again is the arbitrariness and freedom of the fairy tale. Here is a prelogical world in which the grinding of fate’s wheels is wholly unpredictable. . . . Mr. Macdonald’s motto seems to be: Give them enough rope, and they will knot it. This does not, however, have the effect of making his people complex: They resemble, rather, a group of birds—parrots, perhaps—mindlessly beating their wings against the cage of his plot.

  The Broyard slam was more or less countered by Michael Woods’s favorable assessment in the Times’s Sunday Book Review (“Archer tracks the past more obsessively than ever, and the result is the best work Macdonald has done in a number of years”), and this time Millar kept his displeasure private. He really couldn’t complain, he wrote Wolfe: “All the reviews have been favorable, with one notable exception which was almost laughably contra.” Actually he was surprised at how good the book’s notices were, he told Ping Ferry: “better than I expected in view of the difficulty I had finishing it.”

  The responses of bright readers often meant more to him than newspaper assessments. Chandler biographer Frank MacShane wrote Millar of The Blue Hammer: “It seems to me a perfect example of the power and potential of the murder story—the way in which the violence of our lives so often reveals the concessions and lies (and complete subversions of reality) we try unsuccessfully to repress. The violence shows that we cannot do it. The theme of living a lie under the illusion that somehow it is a way of survival is also poignantly revealed in your book, and I could not help but think of [Ford Madox Ford’s] The Good Soldier. Apart from that, the novel is beautifully paced and is vivid without being picturesque, and that I think is one of your strengths (rather unlike Chandler’s line). . . . And it seems to me you have solved at least for this story the problem of involvement that Chandler wrote of when he said that the detective could never get involved with the characters.”

  Jan La Rue, a member of the music faculty at New York University, responded enthusiastically to the tempo of Macdonald’s prose: “It seems to me that the control of sentence rhythms has increased in Blue Hammer. . . . The slowing down in this sentence of yours, for example, hit me like a Weingartner retard: ‘I sat behind a long red light and watched the spoor of oil smoke dissipating, mixing with the general smog that overlay this part of the city.’ The counterpoint of images in the last paragraph of Chapter 9—gaunt trees and masts; reflecting candlelight—gives a marvelous effect, contrapuntal emotionally, too, since the word gaunt reminds the reader of the hollowness of this ménage, despite its seeming richness. Here’s another beautiful sentence: ‘A flock of starlings flew in a twittering cloud, and the first shadow of evening followed them across the sky.’ There are many more.”

  Julian Symons said, “I thought The Blue Hammer was your best book for a long time, and one of the very best you’ve written.” In the Times Literary Supplement, Symons would note how the opening of Hammer, “which casually mentions ‘the towers of the mission and the courthouse half submerged in smog,’ most delicately suggests the mists and confusions through which Archer will look for the truth about Richard Chantry’s missing painting”; Symons judged this novel “in some ways the peak of Macdonald’s achievement.” His colleague H. R. F. Keating, including The Blue Hammer in 1987’s Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books, echoed Symons in thinking it a peak achievement for Macdonald: “a paean of praise to life, to the continuing future, even to its farthest romantic reach of defying death for ever,” and a work of “exceptional strength.”

  Hammer review coverage was supplemented by feature interviews with Macdonald in the Chicago Sun Times, the Houston Chronicle, and the National Observer. John Leonard spotlighted the novel in a “Critic’s Notebook” piece for the daily New York Times. Knopf did a 35,000-copy first printing of the book, which was an alternate selection of the Literary Guild; by publication day, 33,518 books had sold. Another three press runs brought copies to 48,000. Although it didn’t crack the New York Times top ten list (thanks in part perhaps to what Green described to Millar as “your fellow panelist Broyard’s piece of dementia”), Hammer did make the charts of the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Time magazine. “Am all for writing a short lighter book now,” a still-fatigued Millar informed Ferry, “and only hope I can.”

  Instead he agreed to participate in another time-consuming activity: a summerlong series of near-daily interviews with journalist Paul Nelson, who’d made first contact by telephone a few years earlier. Millar and Nelson had met in New York in April; now Nelson, who specialized in stories on artists (usually singer-songwriters) he admired, had an assignment to profile Ross Macdonald for Rolling Stone magazine.

  Millar was eager to reach Rolling Stone’s young audience but was firm about not allowing mention of his only child’s troubles in Nelson’s piece. In the past he had trusted sympathetic journalists not to write about Linda; but given the in-depth sort of story Nelson and his magazine specialized in, Millar felt he needed more than a
n implicit promise. With help from Harris Seed’s office, he drafted a letter of agreement for Nelson and Stone publisher Jann Wenner (a Writers Conference participant) to sign (“After having given the matter much thought, I have decided that I can only consent to an interview with ‘The Rolling Stone’ on the express conditions that. . . any material to be published by ‘The Rolling Stone’ will be submitted to me in advance of publication for my approval of all biographical material pertaining to my family, and that ‘The Rolling Stone’ will not publish any such material not approved by me”). “This sheet of paper,” Nelson recalled, “basically said he could get an injunction and stop the presses if there was anything about the daughter in the piece; this was mostly for the sake of the husband and the grandson.” Nelson and Wenner signed, and the interviews began: forty-five hours of taped conversations at the Coral Casino cabana and in Millar’s Hope Ranch study.

  “He was an extremely tough interview at first,” said Nelson, a dry, soft-spoken man who quizzed Millar on scores of subjects from the biographically specific to the aesthetically abstract. “He couldn’t make small talk at all; he’d just smile at you. It was maddening. It took about an hour to get used to this. When you asked him a question, he’d examine its logic: take it apart phrase by phrase. Very scholarly, very exact; it wasn’t a put-down. I don’t think he was quite aware how uneasy people were around him. It was like taking a college course and having a final exam every day: you had to go in with a hundred and fifty or two hundred questions, because he could not just wing it. And if he didn’t like a question, he’d say, ‘Rephrase your question.’ Sometimes he’d pause for up to a minute; you’d think he was finished talking, but he wasn’t. That took adjusting to. He really was one of the most intelligent people I’d ever met; he’d read everything, and he knew where it all fit into American literature, or the detective genre. But there was a constant problem I had: One day he’d say his books were totally autobiographical, the next day he’d say they weren’t at all. And when I’d try to get him to talk personally instead of about themes, that was territory he did not want to be in. In fact it got him extremely angry. ‘Why do you keep trying to do this?’ he’d say. He wanted to tell the truth, but he didn’t want to go into too much depth. And the daughter was just not a subject you brought up with him. He came on very quiet and scholarly, but underneath he was really one of the toughest people I’d ever known. Like iron. And if there was a line he didn’t want you to cross, there was no way in hell you’d cross it. Lot of contradictions in the man. Deep-set strength beneath this incredible kindness and gentleness, and then it would come roaring out. And he was so quiet and so meek as a rule that when he did get angry, it was more frightening than a maniac.”