Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

Jack Millar was medium sized but powerfully built, a good wrestler and strong swimmer. He made his way to the western Canadian provinces, then south into the United States, where he mined for silver in Colorado. Back in Canada, he lived for close to a year with Indians around Great Slave Lake. In 1899, the territory-wise Jack Millar joined two Toronto newspapermen, John Innes and J. P. McConnell, on a six-week pack-train journey across Alberta and British Columbia.

  Jack was in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1907, when young William Mackenzie King, federal deputy minister of labor, came to investigate anti-Japanese riots there. Millar, friendly with the port’s Japanese fishermen, informally helped the future prime minister in his inquiries.

  A year later, in Red Deer, Alberta, the thirty-four-year-old Millar met a tall, attractive, thirty-three-year-old former nurse named Anna Moyer. Jack courted Annie on horseback and read her his Robbie Burns-like poems. Born in Walkerton, the town whose newspaper Jack’s dad had started, Annie had turned down several youthful suitors in order to study and work in Canada and the States. Typhoid fever caught from a hospital patient had ended her nursing. She was ready to accept Jack’s proposal. Before they married, John Macdonald Millar, like his father before him, became a newspaper editor-manager, taking over a monthly in the copper-mining town of Greenwood, British Columbia; then starting his own paper in Granum, Alberta. Jack and Annie were married in Calgary, Alberta, in September 1909.

  Millar put out three other papers in his first four years of marriage, trekking with Annie to frontier mining, logging, and shipping towns in British Columbia and Alberta. It was a rough haul. Annie had two stillbirths before she and Jack moved to San Diego, California, in 1913. They hoped the California climate would give them a healthy baby. But in San Diego, in 1913, they buried another infant.

  Annie had family living in Escondido, near San Diego, including her married sister Adeline, a Christian Science convert. Adeline told Annie, raised Methodist like her, that if she joined Mary Baker Eddy’s church, she’d have a healthy baby. Annie converted. From San Diego, the Millars went north to Los Gatos, where Annie Millar gave birth to Kenneth. This baby was healthy—twelve and a half pounds—with eyes that were an almost violet blue: his mother’s eyes.

  The Millars returned to Canada. After a mild stroke, Jack Millar gave up newspaper work. In Vancouver, he earned sea captain’s papers and, with the First World War on, became pilot of a harbor boat. The family lived in upper-floor rooms of a downtown waterfront hotel, and here Kennie first became aware of the world around him. His mother read him fairy tales and other stories. She took him bathing at English Bay, a busy beach where a huge black lifeguard kept watch like Neptune over hundreds of youngsters.

  Jack took his boy to the studio of painter John Innes, one of the Toronto newspapermen he’d helped guide from Alberta to Vancouver in 1899. Innes was now a dramatically whiskered artist, capturing on canvas the already vanishing frontier of his and Jack’s journey. His studio, full of pack saddles, riding boots, and other Western gear, was a haven for old cronies like Millar. Innes at work in his lair made a big impression on Jack’s wide-eyed son.

  Kennie showed some artistic ability of his own. Given a slate, he drew chalk pictures, including a pretty good one of Charlie Chaplin, whom he’d seen at the silent pictures. On his slate, Kennie learned numbers and letters. He seemed a bright boy, full of curiosity. At rest, the boy looked serene, with big, wise-seeming eyes and the half-smile of an oriental prince.

  But his parents quarreled. After nine years, their differences now eclipsed what they’d had in common. Annie gave thanks to God and to Christian Science for the good things in life; Jack, the freethinking atheist, put his faith in the social theorist Henry George. In love with the West he’d known when young, Jack was glad to spend the day explaining Indian signs or listening to tall tales told by the snow-blind prospector who lived in the hotel basement; Annie was sick of their unsettled life and of her husband’s fruitless “hobbies.”

  In November 1918, the Great War ended. Mobs of celebrants jammed Vancouver’s streets. Returning troops marched in dress uniform on the avenue near the Hudson’s Bay store. The world had made peace—but not Jack and Annie.

  Around this time Jack took his boy for that boat ride along the Vancouver coast.

  The boy later remembered a less happy incident: when he looked through a hotel balcony grating and saw a body spread-eagled in the alley below. The man wasn’t dead, only dead drunk; but the frightening image stayed in his mind. For the four-year-old, his parents’ separation was as sudden and awful as the sight of that body. Like a child in a fairy tale, he blamed himself. His father’s absence marked him forever. The world, it seemed, was a place that took full payment for an hour of perfect bliss.

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  I must be the only American crime novelist who got his early ethical training in a Canadian Mennonite Sunday School.

  —Ross Macdonald

  When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

  —Matthew 25:31-32.

  Kitchener, Ontario, half a continent away from any ocean, was where Kenneth and Annie Millar went in 1920. Unlike Vancouver, haven of freethinkers, Kitchener was a practical place, founded by Mennonite farmers and settled by German merchants. Instead of sea salt in the air, here there were fumes from three rubber factories. The city had been called Berlin until the recent war, and over half its twenty-two thousand people still spoke German. Black-clad Mennonites came to town in horse-drawn buggies. Annie Millar grew up a few miles from here with eight sisters and brothers, all living above father Aaron Moyer’s Mildmay general store. The Presbyterian Moyer, married to the Mennonite Veronica Bowman, raised his children Methodist. An ex-schoolteacher, Aaron Moyer encouraged his seven daughters and two sons to sing harmony, play instruments, write letters, and draw pictures.

  But Aaron Moyer was dead, buried on the Saskatchewan prairie where he’d gone with his family to homestead at seventy-three. When his widow came back to Ontario, she joined the reformed branch of the Mennonite Church of her youth. No cardplaying or other sinful pursuits were allowed in the two-story, brick bungalow at 32 Brubacher Street where Grandma Moyer lived with Annie’s sister Adeline (who’d wired the money for Annie’s and Ken’s train fares). This was the forbidding house Ken Millar and his mother moved into.

  Grandmother Moyer at seventy-four was a strong-willed woman who demanded obedience. She insisted that five-year-old Kennie attend Sunday school at her New Mennonite church. There he learned about Judgment Day, when the sheep would be separated from the goats. The boy sensed his grandmother and her Bowman kin already placed him with the latter. It was as if his brow bore some mark of Jack Millar’s curse. “My original sin, so to speak,” he later judged, “was to be left by my father.” There was fear and pain now in his blue eyes. His mother changed too. At forty-five, she looked like an old woman. Her and his presence at 32 Brubacher caused problems, and in 1921, Anna and Kennie moved out of Grandma Moyer’s house and into furnished rooms. The boy blamed himself for this, as he’d blamed himself for his father’s having gone away.

  Too weak to work, Annie ran out of funds. Sometimes she took Ken into the street and begged for food. Finally she brought the six-year-old to an orphanage and filled out papers to have him admitted. The iron gates of the orphanage were branded in his memory like the gates to the Mennonites’ hell. At the last minute, as in one of the fairy tales his mother read him, he was rescued. Rob Millar, a cousin of Jack’s who lived ninety miles north of Kitchener, said he and his wife, Elizabeth, would take Ken into their home. Life was full of surprises and sudden reversals. Instead of an orphanage, Ken Millar was sent to live in the town of Wiarton, on the idyllic banks of Georgian Bay.

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  Most of the detective work that accomplishes anything is due to the use of good common sense, and much of the remainder is just luck.

  —William A. Pinkerton, quoted in the Canadian Echo, Wiarton, 1922

  “The Mystery of the Silver Dagger,” by Randall Parrish . . . Here is a double-riveted mystery story as thrilling as anything this great master of mystery, adventure and romantic tales, ever has produced. It is compounded of love, intrigue, a million dollars and mysterious criminals in a most unusual combination . . . Soon to Appear in These Columns. READ IT!

  —The Canadian Echo, Wiarton, 1922

  Millar was a common name in Wiarton, where Jack Millar once won a two-mile swimming race across Colpoys Bay. Nearby was a bump in the road called Millarton, where many of Jack’s Scots-Canadian cousins had settled. A local legend involved the Jane Millar, a passenger steamer that vanished with nary a trace in 1881.

  Kenneth’s “uncle” Rob (actually his second cousin) was the town’s electrical engineer. Having lost two daughters to fatal illness, he and his wife, Elizabeth, welcomed six-year-old Kennie like a son into their George Street house. Elizabeth gave Kenneth an uncomplicated love much easier to accept than his own troubled mother’s. Rob became the first of several father substitutes Kennie found throughout and beyond his childhood.

  Rob Millar’s skills exposed Kennie to new excitements. Over the radio Rob built, Ken heard songs from the States such as “Yes! We Have No Bananas” and “There’ll Be Some Changes Made.” On Saturdays, Rob ran the Wonderland moving picture theater, where Ken watched the silent adventures of Robinson Crusoe and the athletic doings of Pearl White, an androgynous heroine young Ken half fell in love with.

  In Wiarton he started the lifelong habit of reading the newspaper. Rob and Elizabeth Millar were mentioned often in the weekly Canadian Echo’s local columns. Kenneth’s own name began appearing regularly on the Echo’s front page, in monthly school standings that showed him rising to near the top of his elementary school class.

  Through the Echo’s syndicated features and serialized novels, Ken Millar got his first tastes of crime fact and fiction. During 1922 and ’23, the Echo carried interviews with William A. Pinkerton (“head of the greatest detective agency in the world”) and detective-story writers Arthur B. Reeve and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Adventure stories printed in the Echo included Randall Parrish’s “The Mystery of the Silver Dagger,” Conan Doyle’s “The Great Shadow,” and Canadian writer Hesketh Prichard’s “November Joe: The Detective of the Woods.”

  Loved and protected by Rob and Elizabeth, Kenneth Millar found safe haven. But it was tainted by his fear and anger at being parted from his father and mother, and he showed some disturbing behavior. In the schoolyard, Kenneth bullied younger classmates. At his guardians’ home, he initiated frequent sexual play with a mentally retarded teenaged maid. And for the first time, he stole: taking a shiny dime from an Indian basket filled with mementos of Rob and Elizabeth’s dead daughters. With the dime the future crime writer bought a pencil—then deliberately broke the pencil in two.

  Despite these acts, he was happier in Wiarton than he’d been since Vancouver. And as in Vancouver, life took payment in full. In October 1923, fifty-one-year-old Elizabeth Millar went to nearby Owen Sound for a gallbladder operation. She died on the surgeon’s table. A grieving Rob Millar said he could no longer look after his “nephew.” Like a character in one of the Wonderland Theater’s serials, Kenneth Millar was catapulted again into an uncertain future.

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  The heart felt sympathy of the community goes out to Mr. Millar . . . and to little Kenneth, in the great loss they have sustained.

  —The Canadian Echo, October 31, 1923

  Anna Moyer had moved back to her mother’s house at 32 Brubacher. That’s where Kenneth joined her in late 1923, a month before his eighth birthday. Also living in the two-story brick bungalow were his thirty-seven-year-old bachelor uncle Edwin, who worked in a commercial laundry; and his recently widowed aunt Adeline, head of filing at the Mutual Life Assurance in neighboring Waterloo.

  Jack Millar too was in Kitchener in 1923, clerking a while for Mutual Life (probably thanks to Adeline), then employed at the Kitchener Gas Works. He and Annie, never divorced, tried twice to reconcile—living together briefly and arguing sometimes violently about money and sex. The reconciliations didn’t take.

  Jack lingered in Ontario for a few years, in rented Kitchener rooms or at an uncle’s Caledon East farm. Kennie spent bits of summer with his dad but for the most part was in his mother’s company. Annie and her boy, poor to the bone, moved from one rooming-house address to another: 124 Krug Street, 43 Ellen Street East, 52 Francis Street North. One place they stayed was run by a Mrs. Funk. Sometimes they stopped with relatives, such as Sylvia Vollick, one of Annie’s married sisters, in Mildmay. All the Moyers felt sorry for them, but no one had room or money to spare.

  Kenneth went away from both parents some summers, to the farm of another married aunt. When he was eight, two young male cousins there introduced him to “homo-sex,” which excited and shamed him. At this same farm, he speared his groin walking a picket fence and had to be taken to the hospital.

  Without a father around, he was vulnerable to temptations and dangers. His overemotional mother couldn’t protect him. In cramped rooms in Kitchener, Annie and her son slept in the same bed, long after he felt right about it. He sensed he’d taken his father’s place in his fractured family. The woman once ready to give him to an orphanage was devoted to him in ways that seemed unhealthy. She expected him to do what Jack Millar couldn’t: rescue them from their wretched state. Sometimes Annie was sentimentally loving, other times violently critical. Her son learned to gauge her moods and manipulate them.

  She came up with pathetic schemes to earn money—such as going door-to-door selling homemade dusting cloths—that he was afraid his Suddaby classmates would learn of. Ken didn’t speak of his mother unless he had to. Nor did he mention his dad. Few Kitchener people even knew of Jack’s existence. Many took it for granted Annie was a widow. Ken Millar learned early to keep family secrets.

  He escaped by reading and could often start a book at dawn and finish it by breakfast. He devoured the adventure serials (Edgar Wallace’s Sanders of the River and The Green Archer) in British boys’ magazines such as Chums. He loved the Tarzan stories. And at ten, he was bowled over by Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, a tale of a workhouse boy fallen among thieves. He read it for so many hours at a time that his mother worried he’d damage his eyes. Ken Millar identified with Oliver, his grinding poverty, the dangers that menaced him. Oliver’s workhouse reminded Kenneth of the orphanage he’d escaped. Dickens wrote of a world the Kitchener boy recognized: violent and frightening, full of rescues and snares, of instant enemies and unknown relatives. Oliver Twist, like the scary Pearl White serial in Wiarton, was something you could put your fears into and feel better for.

  In 1927, Kenneth’s life took another Dickensian turn. His father’s sister Margaret, an aunt he’d never met, invited her eleven-year-old nephew to come live with her in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and attend a private school at her expense.

  No doubt Jack Millar was behind this (as he’d probably been behind cousin Rob’s bringing Kennie to Wiarton). Annie Millar could hardly refuse this generous offer. Again Kenneth was sent off by himself, this time by train, to another province and a world different from any he’d known.

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  An education that aims not merely at instruction in sound knowledge, but at the building up of a manly Christian character under religious influence—that is the ideal of St. John’s.

  —St. John’s College School, Winnipeg, Class and Honor List, 1928

  K. Millar: Who’s the best business man in the world?

  Byng: John D. Rockefeller.

  Millar: No. A man who can buy from a Jew and sell to a Scotc
hman at a profit.

  —The Black and Gold, St. John’s College School, 1929

  St. John’s was an Anglican school, a college prep academy founded in 1820 and modeled on English lines; most of the masters were English. There were playing fields, a skating rink, and a gymnasium. The curriculum here was rigorous: Latin, French, English, geography, math, algebra, geometry, physics; British, Canadian, and general history; religion. Daily chapel and military drill were compulsory. Ken Millar sang in the St. John’s church choir and competed in gym, hockey, and team equestrian events.

  The other St. John’s boys were sons of well-to-do merchants and ministers from several provinces and even U.S. cities like Chicago—a much different bunch from the ragtag “Five Points gang” Millar played street hockey and “run sheep run” with in Kitchener.

  During the week, he boarded at school. After dorm bedtime, he’d rig a mirror to reflect hall light on his pillow so he could read into the night. Ken Millar liked stories of heroes who worked outside the law, righting wrongs and making the rich pay: gentleman-thief Jimmie Dale, written by Canadian-American Frank L. Packard; O. Henry’s safecracker Jimmy Valentine; best of all Falcon Swift, “the Monocled Manhunter,” who starred in an English boys’ magazine Millar bought on Saturdays at a store on North Main.

  Weekends he stayed at his aunt Margaret’s apartment at 109 Devon Court, on Broadway, across from the provincial capitol. His father’s sister was a “sophisticated” woman who smoked cigarettes and drove an automobile. Aunt Margaret had worked as a Detroit bookkeeper, then married a Chicago florist who died and left her well-off. In Winnipeg, she apparently supervised a string of beauty parlors and played the stock market. She was married to a Winnipeg man named Ed, with an adopted son (younger than Millar) whose middle name was Ross; this boy too went to St. John’s.