Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  For genre writers with “crossover” books, the rewards could be huge. After scoring a best-seller with her first novel, Where Are the Children?, suspense writer Mary Higgins Clark (a congress attendee) got half a million dollars from her hardcover publisher and a million from her paperback house for 1978’s Stranger Is Watching—sums comparable to those being paid “blockbuster” mainstream authors like E. L. Doctorow (Ragtime) and Colleen McCullough (The Thorn Birds). Garden-variety mystery writers were feeling the squeeze, though. Beginners had a harder time getting into paperback or even hardcover. It seemed unlikely young writers could still do what the Millars had: make a frugal living through mysteries while improving skills and working toward greater success.

  All this saddened Millar, who’d often urged would-be novelists such as Jerre Lloyd to try detective fiction “in the meantime,” as Millar had. More disheartening was the decline in quality as books were aimed at bigger markets and lower common denominators. When the merely popular drove out the serious, there’d be nothing to buy but Ian Fleming and Mickey Spillane. “Is it possible that a form of fiction can be too successful for its own good, attracting writers whose sole qualification is the possession of a typewriter and readers who would be better off at the movies?” asked Macdonald rhetorically in Publishers Weekly. “Somehow the wild laws of the market take care of the bad writers, paying some of them like idiot princes.”

  Ross Macdonald, the philosopher king of detective novelists, was a star attraction at the Second International Congress of Crime Writers. Alfred A. Knopf and Bantam Books jointly sponsored a Ross Macdonald Luncheon on Thursday, March 16, where the author read an untitled speech written for the occasion, a serviceable reshuffling of remarks about himself and the Gothic tradition that he’d made several times before. It wasn’t a difficult talk, yet Millar had trouble with it. “Every sentence made sense,” recalled Julian Symons, “but it wasn’t fully coherent. He jumped from one thing to another without apparently understanding that he was doing so. For about the first five minutes, he really was tremendously hazy.” Millar regained his footing, though, to give what Symons described in the London Sunday Times Magazine as “the most interesting speech of the congress.”

  Fred Klein, Bantam Books’ vice president of promotion and advertising, noticed a big change in Macdonald, though, when he said hello to him at the luncheon: “It was like he was in left field. It was sad to see what I’d always considered a very sharp, sensitive man, who was now almost absentminded. He was very close to the vest that day; it was almost like he wouldn’t even admit that he was Ross Macdonald. That may have been protective coloration, I suppose. But he was like an old, old man.”

  Symons also noted a certain blurriness, as well as a bit of odd behavior: “My wife and I had a long talk with him that evening; he was staying at the Algonquin, and we were staying at a very much cheaper hotel almost opposite, called the Royalton. And he said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning, about eleven.’ So we said, yes, fine, very good. Well, it was about eight-thirty in the morning, there came a knock on our door—and there was Ken, fully dressed and with his hat on and smiling, saying, ‘We have a date for breakfast, haven’t we?’ Well, we just put it down to confusion, that we got the times wrong. But there was a general sort of absentmindedness in his manner: he didn’t always answer precisely what you were saying; his mind seemed to stray onto something else.”

  * * *

  Once back in Santa Barbara, Millar felt there weren’t enough hours to do the things that had to be done, let alone new projects. The Instant Enemy screenplay still took nearly all his creative energy in 1978. When New Orleans writer Jerry Speir asked for input on a book he was doing on deadline about Macdonald’s fiction, Millar limited participation to a one-hour telephone call, apologizing, “I’m sorry I can’t offer you more time, but I am running short of that commodity.”

  Millar used what writing strength was left after script chores to answer correspondents, including Eudora Welty. His friendship with Welty, Millar wrote Donald Davie, was “one of the best things that have ever happened to me . . . an opening of the heart.” Welty and Millar hadn’t seen each other for a while, but they were linked in a way this spring by both being a part of Richard Moore’s series on American writers shown on PBS-TV. And in April, Eudora Welty’s The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews was published with the dedication “To Kenneth Millar.”

  He stopped seeing his Santa Barbara psychiatrist in June 1978, apparently concluding his problems weren’t psychological but merely “the encroachments of age.” Happily his wife stayed productive: despite painful shingles, Margaret finished writing a comic mystery (The Murder of Miranda), about which Millar was typically enthusiastic (“Parts of it remind me of Evelyn Waugh!”). Margaret had eye trouble late in 1978, prompting three trips to a retinal clinic in Palo Alto; but she seemed feisty as ever. A few years later she’d tell a Mystery Writers of America meeting, “In 1978 we had quite a severe earthquake in Santa Barbara. They’re never quite so bad, though, that the insurance companies have to pay off the deductible. But the house was a mess. Ken was missing—because, as every woman in this audience knows, men have some intuitive, built-in warning system that enables them to get out when an emergency is about to occur. So he was at the beach with the three dogs. Meanwhile, the house was a shambles: every drawer and cupboard was open, including the refrigerator, with the contents spilling out; gallons of water had spilled out of the swimming pool and the toilets—which was a new experience to me; all the books had fallen out of the bookcases. So I began to clean up. A few minutes later Ken appeared and surveyed the damage, saying, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m having an orgy, why don’t you join me?’ and handed him a mop.”

  Millar finished his Instant Enemy script, “for good or ill,” in November and turned it over to another writer, much to his and everyone else’s relief. “It did have the virtue of being hard to write,” he told Davie. “Soon I can get back to my knitting.”

  Still he didn’t begin a book. Bantam had printed eight hundred thousand paperbacks of The Blue Hammer; Macdonald’s income was a comfortable $136,000 in 1978. (Margaret earned $14,000 this year.) Millar savored the pleasures of later life. These included visits from grandson Jim, now an energetic high school student in Irvine. “He’s genuinely good,” Millar told Davie in December. “What more can I say for him? And not a piss-willie either. This week he’s off in his new car (a secondhand VW most of which he earned himself) to go skiing in Utah.” Millar shared the affectionate company of a new dog, Star, a Newfoundland he claimed was the smartest animal he’d ever had: “as clever as a cop who knows where all the exits are and who controls them, and how, and would follow the stock market if I were to teach him to read.”

  Millar found this Santa Barbara winter “deep and slow and golden” and seemed almost to dread the effort of starting a novel. When two producers from England’s Royal Shakespeare Company proposed putting together a Lew Archer play, the author asked Dorothy Olding what she thought of his collaborating with them; his agent answered, “I can only say that it has been a long time between books.”

  Millar knew that. The play was only a daydream, he said, to take his mind off “high local pressures”: his wife’s intermittent illnesses, his own declining strength. “After our incredible long romantic youths, and even more romantic middle-ages,” he wrote Davie alarmingly on the eve of his sixty-third birthday, “our foreheads come up against vertical stone. Well, I’ll write my name on it, with whatever relevant facts I can bring to mind.”

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  At the lowest point in my life, the doorbell rang. And there, quite literally, was Lew Archer, on a compassionate mission, come to save my life.

  —Warren Zevon to Paul Nelson, Rolling Stone

  Lacking a Ross Macdonald novel to publish, Knopf hoped to keep the author’s momentum going in 1979 with a third Lew Archer anthology. After much discussion, Mill
ar and Ash Green agreed on the novels to include in it: The Doomsters, The Zebra-Striped Hearse, and The Instant Enemy. The novels’ author wrote Olding the first week in March, “I’ve been rereading parts of the three books, not with unmitigated pleasure, but on the whole with some satisfaction. My excuse is that I have to write an introduction to them. They are violent and sad books, as intended.” Millar had done this sort of guardedly autobiographical preface before, and well; but this one gave him trouble. He turned down a request from the New Republic to review Shana Alexander’s book on Patty Hearst (the kidnapped California heiress-turned-bank-robber whose story seemed to many as if it might have come from a Ross Macdonald novel) in order to bear down on the task. He had difficulty organizing his thoughts and even his handwriting: certain words and letters came out wrong and had to be retraced. “My own personal tides are not as strong and dependable as I would like them to be,” Millar wrote Jane Bernstein in April, “but one can’t have everything forever.” This anthology was titled Archer in Jeopardy, but Millar seemed the one in peril. May found him still laboring over his foreword: “Not easy,” he told Olding, “but I hope to say something that hasn’t been said before.” The shortest such foreword he’d ever written, it avoided direct reference to the novels at hand but conveyed poignantly how Millar’s early life had affected Macdonald’s fiction:

  I hope my books echo (but not too plainly) the feelings which moved my kin when they were alive, the things they were ready to die for, money and music, paintings and each other, fear of God, and their fundamental wish to be remembered, if possible loved.

  I love them better now than I did then, and through my stories I understand them better. Sometimes I feel that the stories were written by them to me, asking me to communicate their sorrows and explain their dreams.

  Considering the effort it cost him, the little preface seemed a big achievement. Millar was grateful for Olding’s assurance the piece was okay. He seized the quick chance to write another more revealing such fragment about himself and his poetry-writing sea-captain father, for a small-press edition of fourteen Millar/Macdonald book reviews. Each assignment he completed now seemed like a victory. This one ended:

  The last time I saw my father’s living eyes, I was a high school boy in Southern Ontario. He was a patient in a metropolitan hospital in Toronto. He had entirely lost the power of speech, but he could still write.

  He wrote me a few lines in a book on his knee.

  I wish I could tell you what he wrote to me that day. His writing was so shaky that I couldn’t make out the words. But I could see that it was written in rhymed couplets.

  “Are you working on a book?” Olding asked pointedly in June. Millar felt it necessary to reassure her, “I am not retiring from fiction. But I had reached a point where I had to gather my forces and intentions, and refresh myself with a change. I haven’t told anyone that I had stopped writing because in fact I hadn’t—that film script was the toughest job I ever undertook—and of course I didn’t want that kind of publicity. So I will ask you to keep it to yourself.”

  His wife had a book out this season: her tale of high jinks and low morals at a beach club, The Murder of Miranda, which got good notices such as this one from the New York Times Book Review’s Newgate Callendar: “In many respects it is a novel of manners, written in sophisticated prose with a leavening of humor . . . . She is a virtuoso.” Meanwhile half a dozen older Macdonald works, from Find a Victim to Sleeping Beauty, were available in new editions from his paperback house, which bragged, “Ross Macdonald has 13,400,000 books in Bantam print!”

  “Believe me,” Bantam’s Fred Klein said two decades later, when million-copy press runs were common, “the number of copies we put out for Ross Macdonald in those days were nothing to what they would certainly be today. And there came a time when we decided we were going to package Macdonald’s books as ‘A Lew Archer Novel,’ sort of subtly making the transition from mystery to novel. Again, today that’s much more prevalent, but there never was such an idea back in the sixties, maybe into the seventies. Yet it was happening: certain kinds of mysteries had become more sophisticated and better written; they were novels that dealt with mysteries or whatever. Certainly the public recognized it quickly. And I really think it was Ken who began it all.”

  Millar was anxious to begin another book, but his attentions were needed elsewhere. Margaret’s eye trouble was getting worse. She had laser surgery to repair retinal damage; the Millars hoped for the best. Ken Millar’s preoccupation seemed to express itself in atypical sloppiness about business matters: he misplaced correspondence, failed to initial agreements, forgot to mail contracts. When someone at Ober wrote to say a reprint house that had already arranged for a hardcover edition of The Moving Target now also wanted to do The Dark Tunnel, Millar misread the letter and replied he “would be glad to see The Moving Target back in hardcover.”

  Mostly he kept his troubles to himself or emphasized the positive. To Julian Symons he wrote in athletic metaphor, “We skate along, having to avoid the places where the ice is thin, but able to stand upright most of the time.” When it seemed that Margaret had “just about completely regained her health,” he finally confided to Olding, “It will come as no surprise to you that I have been having a fairly difficult year—I’d have mentioned it earlier if it would have served any purpose.” Things were nearly normal again, he assured Olding in August, and he looked forward to “getting back into full working fettle.” With this August letter, Millar returned a foreign contract his agent had sent for his signature—a contract Olding had to mail back again: he’d forgotten to sign it.

  Despite his own problems, Millar took time to help friends, acquaintances, and total strangers—Dr. Edwin C. Peck Jr., for instance, an Irvine, California, psychoanalyst who sought Ross Macdonald’s creative input in treating a patient in 1979. “I had a homicide detective in psychoanalysis,” remembered Dr. Peck, “which is a kind of personality structure that almost never gets into analysis for a variety of reasons. This fella was a complicated individual, with a lot of depression and anxiety. So as sometimes happens in the field, you get fired up about your patient’s area of specialty. I dug into the works of Millar and a lot of detective writers, and then I wrote to several of them. And Millar was particularly thoughtful and responsive. We exchanged letters, and then I spoke with him on the telephone.

  “At first he started off real humble about what he did not know, and how he was a writer of stories rather than a student of the behavior of homicide detectives. But interestingly, he could really grasp the character of this analysand of mine who had done outstanding work running a city department and kind of intensely identified with the role of hero. So, humble though Ross Macdonald was, he was effective in correctly estimating the cadence of the guy’s psychology, for instance the role of the family life: he seemed to be in touch with that. It was this combination of humility, availability, and that he could use his imagination to effectively estimate what the actual homicide detective would be like, correctly—even though he said he couldn’t! Yeah, he made quite a contribution. In fact the analysis turned out to be successful. The guy came in immobilized—serious depression, anxiety, radically out of touch with his family—and, working at the analysis, he became deeply aware of his love for his children, got a better position in his department, and more secure work than he’d ever had in his life. So, yeah, Macdonald gave me a lot, in two letters and one talk on the phone. Others cooperated, but no one else was as helpful. He was just one of those rare characters.”

  Paul Nelson asked Millar for a more direct sort of intervention in 1979. The Rolling Stone writer came to Santa Barbara to see Warren Zevon, who’d moved with his wife to Montecito a year earlier. “One way or another,” Zevon recalled, “I think we were prompted to buy a house in Santa Barbara ’cause it was Ross Macdonald Land to us; that was reason enough back then to make, you know, moves around the world.” The singer-songwriter and his wife were apart this season, though. Ze
von had just checked out of Pinecrest, a Santa Barbara facility he’d entered for the second time (with Nelson’s help) to fight drinking and other problems.

  “Zevon was in bad, bad, bad shape,” Nelson said. “I had to go back to New York. People had been trying to get him to return to the drug center, and the only way I could see his actually doing it was if Ken Millar came and told him: somebody he really respected, a major father figure. So I said to Millar, ‘I know this guy just reveres you, he looks up to you like a god; would you be willing to go and talk to him, ’cause I know it would mean more coming from you.’ Margaret said, ‘Good luck, it’s a fine thing you’re trying to do, but face it: the guy’s chances of straightening out are about zip.’ But Ken said, ‘Sure, if you think it’ll do any good, I’ll go.’ I went back to Zevon’s house. Zevon didn’t know he was coming. The doorbell rings, Zevon goes to the door, and it’s Ken Millar. I went off and left them alone and came back after Ken was gone. For Zevon, he said, it was like right out of one of Macdonald’s books: ‘I went to the door and Lew Archer was there, come to save my life.’ It never dawned on me that’s how he’d take it: there was Lew Archer, trying to straighten out this troubled kid who happened to be Zevon.”

  Years later, Zevon remembered the day: “I was right out of detox, in a time when the attitude towards drug and alcohol renunciation had a lot more to do with medallion-wearing therapists than it did with twelve-step programs. So I was sitting in my palatial shithouse in Montecito, in terrible Valium withdrawal, with instructions not to miss therapy the next day. I was in real bad shape. And I remember him coming to the door. Ken was wearing some kind of plaid fedora, like a private eye. And I said something to him like, ‘This is a little scary for me.’ And he said, ‘Nobody’s scared of old Ken,’ and walked in and spent the afternoon.