Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Aunt Margaret gave weekend parties at her apartment, where paintings of nudes hung on the walls and a Pianola cranked out hits of the day like “In a Little Spanish Town.” Her party guests were active on the stock and grain exchanges and in Winnipeg politics. Millar, used to damp Kitchener rooming houses where rats sometimes scurried in the walls, got a taste of how the other half lived.

  There were odd things about his aunt’s household, though. Uncle Ed kept a heavy handgun in his Packard glove box: an odd accessory for someone listed in the Winnipeg directory sometimes as a dentist and sometimes as a chiropractor. Millar in time concluded that his uncle managed a Winnipeg slot machine racket, one with ties to a Detroit crime syndicate.

  Kenneth kept out of Uncle Ed’s way. Aunt Margaret, who “smiled like a lioness,” bought Millar school clothes and took him to see touring English plays (The Pirates of Penzance) and his first “talking pictures.”

  One day his father, shy and uncertain, showed up at Devon Court and proposed that his boy come with him out West, where Jack was bound for one last journey. His son didn’t want to leave school and go West. Jack departed Winnipeg alone.

  The visit was a painful reminder of Kenneth’s father’s failures, and it made the twelve-year-old ashamed and angry. He got into fistfights with some of his classmates, and homosexual episodes with other boys. He stole. He filched drinks from his aunt’s parties and got drunk.

  But he worked hard at St. John’s. He spent his evenings in the gym, practicing on the uneven and horizontal bars and the sawhorse, and earned a drill medal in mid-1928. He also won honors in English, mathematics, and Bible study. “An excellent scholar,” his headmaster wrote on his midsummer report. Millar placed second in his class and was given a scholarship.

  In Kitchener for the summer, Kenneth saw his father again, returned from the West where Jack had shipped out as a common seaman. Jack Millar had done a brave thing: jumped into icy waters to rescue a comrade fallen overboard. But the act broke what was left of his health. Jack had come back to Ontario to die.

  On July 1, 1928, a few weeks shy ofhis fifty-fifth birthday, John Millar of 72 Ontario Street West wrote a two-page letter of advice to his twelve-year-old son: “Be kind, industrious and independent. Keep up physical exercises. Practice writing and public speaking. Don’t quarrel with anyone. It is futile. Don’t fight unless you have to—then fight like hell.” Jack appended a reading list: Robert Burns, Luther Burbank, Thomas Paine, Clemenceau, Jefferson, Ingersoll, Henry George, Adam Smith, Karl Marx. “Without humanity,” he wrote, “all religion is as ‘sounding brass.’ It is the ‘tinkling cymbal’ of the glad-handers and that’s what most religionists and politicians are. (Propagandists.)” Jack told his boy to be considerate of other people’s rights and opinions, and to make the most of his life. “ ‘Knowledge has power,’ and both money and the pen are mightier than the sword.” He signed himself, “Daddy.”

  “Throughout my life,” Millar wrote in late middle age, “I remained my father’s son.”

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  Jack Millar’s testament sent his boy back to St. John’s with new purpose. He applied himself aggressively to his studies, and by Christmas he was at the head of his class.

  Millar had decided he wanted to be a writer. For years reading had been his best escape from unpleasant reality, his chief entertainment and source of information. Books were the most important thing to him, except people; writing seemed almost sacred. In stories (as in movies, which he also loved) you could shape things in ways that let you make sense of them, get them under control.

  Kenneth wanted to be a writer like Dickens, whose Oliver Twist set his heart and mind racing. Dickens was a writer anyone could appreciate; he wrote classics for common people.

  There were writing models on both sides of Millar’s family. His mother’s people expressed themselves well in letters; and his mother’s brother Stanley Moyer, the artist, wrote poems and articles for magazines. Ken’s grandfather had started the Walkerton newspaper. And there was his father, who worked all his life with words, for profit and for pleasure.

  During his hours alone at St. John’s, Kenneth labored on poems and stories. One was a ballad of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Scottish Pretender, who fled to France with the help of a woman named Macdonald.

  Millar didn’t neglect his studies, though, and was first in his form again at midsummer 1929. “A most promising young Scholar,” his headmaster wrote. “He will go far if he gets the chance.”

  But he wouldn’t. When the term ended, he learned he’d be leaving St. John’s. His aunt had lost money in the stock market and couldn’t afford his fees: that’s what he was told. But for all Kenneth knew, he was getting the boot because of something wrong done at school or in the apartment. His life was starting to seem like some mean game of snakes and ladders.

  He spent the summer in Kitchener, until another aunt volunteered to take him: his mother’s sister Laura in Medicine Hat, Alberta. Now thirteen, Kenneth again boarded the transcontinental train.

  In Alberta, the coldest and most cheerless place he’d seen, he went through tenth grade at Medicine Hat’s Alexandra High School. Ken Millar liked Aunt Laura but never warmed to Uncle Fred, a school inspector and amateur naturalist with a collection of tens of thousands of dead beetles. Millar kept up his grades in Medicine Hat and didn’t steal, but there were homosexual incidents with other boys, and he thought his aunt and uncle learned of one, though they didn’t say so. When spring term ended, though, he was told he’d be leaving Medicine Hat.

  Back he went to Kitchener, to his grandmother’s red-brick bungalow. Uncle Edwin with the cleft palate was still there, and hardworking Aunt Adeline, and disapproving Grandma Moyer. Hardest of all for Millar to deal with was his pitiable mother, who was coming apart emotionally, either raging at him or expecting him to restore the family fortunes. He took to hitchhiking, to get away from the house. In Wiarton he looked up Rob Millar, half-hoping for an invitation to come live here again. But Rob Millar was remarried and had a real son. Ken stayed the night and left the next day, rejected again.

  He hitched to the Bruce Peninsula to see his father on a run-down farm where Jack was staying with a sick male cousin. “Old Jack” was unable to speak after his most recent stroke, but the poet kept writing and still had a spark in his eye.

  With no place else to go, Millar enrolled for eleventh grade at the Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate Institute: KCI. To ease the sting of being a poor relation, he got an after-school job as stockboy and handyman in a “groceteria.” Working two hours each schoolday and all day Saturday, he earned two and a quarter dollars a week: pretty good wages considering Canada, like the States, was now in the grip of a great financial depression that looked as if it could last forever.

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  DASHIELL HAMMETT writes a superior mystery novel because for many years he was a Pinkerton detective. He is probably the only “bull” who has ever turned his experience into the writing of crime stories. To Hammett, plot is not the main thing in the story. It is the behavior of the detective attacking a problem which intrigues him.

  —Dust jacket, The Maltese Falcon, 1930

  The ambitious young investigator, Herlock Sholmes, yawned behind his false moustache and poured for himself a cocaine-and-soda.

  —Kenneth Millar, “The South Sea Soup Co.,” The Grumbler, 1931

  In Kitchener, Millar continued to steal and to have sex with other boys, though guilt over both things made him miserable. He also kept making poems and stories, training to be a writer. Wanting encouragement but not trusting the KCI teachers, he showed his poetry to his mother’s cousin Sheldon Brubacher, a Toronto high school instructor with a university degree. Brubacher said Kenneth’s poems reminded him of early work by Byron and Shelley (a flattering exaggeration, Millar much later realized). This praise gave him the confidence to continue.

  At KCI, he made friends with half a dozen male students who also
wrote. The boys showed their pages to one another and discussed books. Wanting to learn more than what was taught at school, they read and analyzed works by Aristotle and the pre-Socratic philosophers. Millar spent a lot of time at the Kitchener Public Library, where the woman in charge was B. Mabel Dunham, a published author of local-historical novels.

  Miss Dunham (a practicing spiritualist who claimed she communed with the deceased she wrote about) had reason to take note of Millar. She knew his artist uncle Stan Moyer, whom Millar sometimes hitchhiked to visit in Toronto. Moyer’s articles were printed in magazines that the library stocked; eventually Stan Moyer painted Mabel Dunham’s portrait.

  Millar’s uncle was a gentle-looking man with dry Canadian wit. Uncle Stan stirred memories of Ken Millar’s visits to John Innes’s Vancouver studio, and his work showed Ken how to see with a painter’s eye: a crucial thing for the writer he hoped to become. Stan Moyer was an essential emblem: a member of Millar’s own family who was a real artist. Stan’s sister (Ken’s Aunt Louisa) had married an American architect named Albert Wood; their household, full of artistically gifted kids, was another hopeful beacon to Millar. The novelist-librarian Mabel Dunham was important in a similar way. The achievements of these people Millar knew personally encouraged him to think he too might accomplish such things.

  Miss Dunham’s library became Ken Millar’s second home. He checked its “recent arrivals” section often, alert for books from New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf, whose well-printed volumes Kenneth thought were always the best. Millar read every Knopf “Borzoi Book” he could find. Each Saturday, he also read the new issues of all the English and American magazines. When he discovered the American Mercury, an outstanding U.S. journal edited by H. L. Mencken and with strong ties to Knopf, Kenneth hunted in secondhand-book stores for back issues.

  All this was to prepare himself for a writing career. But Millar read for pleasure too: lots of science fiction and (his special favorite) detective stories. Vowing to read every mystery in the library, he went through hundreds of British and American books by such writers as Allingham, Bentley, Chesterton, Christie, Conan Doyle, and S. S. Van Dine. Mabel Dunham saw what he was up to and stocked the mystery section creatively. “I had read all of Crime and Punishment,” he later wrote, “before I realized I’d been conned by an expert.”

  Another KCI student often at the library was Margaret Sturm, the brightest girl at school. Witty, popular, and a good pianist, she was the daughter of alderman Henry Sturm, manager of the Conger-Lehigh Coal Company. Like Ken Millar, Margaret Sturm liked to read mysteries and liked to write stories and poems. She submitted a Maugham-like tale to KCI’s 1931 student annual, the Grumbler, where Millar was literary editor. He accepted it for the issue’s lineup, along with a sketch of his own: a Sherlock Holmes parody in the style of Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock. It was Millar’s first printed story, a small step toward his goal of becoming a professional.

  He kept that dream to himself. It wasn’t smart to speak openly at the Brubacher house, in the face of his grandmother’s Pennsylvania Dutch mutterings that he was bound to come to a bad end. His mother on the other hand was sure he was destined for greatness, and her pipe dreams were just as difficult to bear. Anna tried to inspire her boy with stories of their distant Bowman cousin who’d helped found Johns Hopkins, and of Kenneth’s great-grandfather who walked to Canada from Pennsylvania with only a quarter and died a rich man, and of his grandfather the newspaper publisher who’d also been justice of the peace. Often Anna reminded her son he’d been born in California, a golden land she hoped he’d return to.

  Millar spent as little time as possible in the Brubacher Street house, whose every inch—the leaded-glass fanlight above the front door, the faded wallpaper, the stains in the sink—seemed depressing. Using his gymnast skills, he shinnied up and down the drainpipe to come and go as he pleased. He’d sneak into movie theaters without paying to see pictures like The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu. Downtown he discovered McCallum’s Cigar Store, a billiard parlor on King Street West.

  McCallum’s had a barbershop and a rental library. There were slot machines of the sort found in stores and restaurants all over town. A constant poker game went on upstairs. But the big lure were the smooth green pool tables, lit by overhead lamps and hazed in blue tobacco smoke. The teenaged Millar was accepted in McCallum’s, no questions asked. Playing pool and smoking cigarettes under the pressed-iron ceiling, he felt like a man. The pool hall became as much a haven as the public library.

  He was being pulled in two directions. The split within him had grown since he was a kid, when he’d learned to keep facts and feelings to himself. Now he had vices to hide: smoking, drinking, stealing, sex. He was leading a double life: in public he was a well-mannered, soft-spoken, bookish young person; roaming the town on his own, he was a fellow full of shame and envy.

  He wanted to make something of himself but wasn’t certain he could. He lived in poverty, went to school in a tattered windbreaker, wore the same sweater all year. He knew he was smart, but he sensed his potential for evil. When he saw a well-fed, well-loved boy somewhere—at the train station, say, fussed over by loving parents—part of him wanted to be that youngster, part of him wanted to smash the kid.

  He was always aware of the gulf between haves and have-nots. His father was in a charity ward (“the poorhouse”), where Anna went and nursed him at his worst: another painful family secret.

  All over Canada, young people were angry about the financial depression that saw families living on pennies. Millar was angrier than most. He was mad at his mother for being ignorant of life, mad at his father for causing their situation, mad at a town that looked down on a fatherless boy, mad at a world that allowed such things. He was angry at himself and his own self-pity. If he’d still believed in God, he’d have been angry with Him.

  The teenager turned his discontented attention on the hidden life of the city. What secret deals allowed some people to pay for nice houses and clothing and cars? The slot machines all over town drew his special scrutiny. “Mint machines,” they were called, but they paid off in twenty-dollar jackpots. There was a machine in the lunchroom across from school; lots of boys lost money in it, but school authorities never acknowledged its presence. These slots probably took in thousands of dollars, but city fathers ignored this thriving racket in a kind of conspiracy of silence. Maybe police were paid to look the other way. Maybe gangsters from the States were involved.

  Other betting went on in Kitchener. The poker room was easy to find, as was the floating dice game. Horse bets were taken in cigar stores and pool halls. Bookmakers did business out of private houses. All these things were open secrets, and it irked Millar that you never encountered this sort of real life in fiction.

  But that changed. Browsing the rental library at McCallum’s, he found a novel by a man called Dashiell Hammett. It was fitting he see it here, where money was gambled and deals were made. (Alderman Henry Sturm, Marg Sturm’s father and soon to be the mayor of Kitchener, was a former McCallum’s manager.) This Hammett novel was just the sort of book Millar sought: one that told the truth about how the world worked. It was a mystery novel, supposedly, but unlike any mystery Millar had ever read: set in a tough town, with real-seeming crooks, cops, politicians, and other types tangled together. Hard-boiled was the word for this new kind of crime story. “As I stood there absorbing Hammett’s novel,” he later wrote, “the slot machines at the back of the shop were clanking and whirring, and in the billiard room upstairs the perpetual poker game was being played. Like iron filings magnetized by the book in my hands, the secret meanings of the city began to organize themselves around me.”

  This novel confirmed his sense of how things worked, not only in Kitchener but in other cities such as Winnipeg, scene of a violent general strike and home of his scary uncle. He read most of the Hammett book in one standing. It was printed by Alfred A. Knopf, his favorite publisher. But Millar hadn’t seen this important work at the pub
lic library, where Knopf books were stocked as a matter of course. Why wasn’t it there?

  It was there, he discovered—but along with other new and old titles, it was hidden. Library staff kept certain books out of sight of the public in whose name they’d been purchased. Exploring the library, Millar came upon these restricted books and was outraged at being denied things he thought vital to his education. At night, when the library was closed, Millar climbed its fire escape and entered the building through an unlocked window. He went to the room with the uncirculated books and read his fill of Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, Rabelais, Flaubert, and William Faulkner. When he left, he took revenge, like a literary Falcon Swift, on those who would rob him of such essential writing. He stole an armful of best-selling fiction from the open shelves: the sort of false-to-life stuff he considered trash. On the way back to his bed at 32 Brubacher, Millar dropped this junk down a manhole and into the Kitchener sewer.

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  It is generally agreed by doctors that a school pupil should sleep at least 10 hours a day. Harvey Bacher is “sleeping” up to this fact in 102.

  Mr. Archer on the other hand, prefers the policy of Lafontaine’s “to let the sleeping dog lie.”

  —“Form News,” The Grumbler, 1931

  Visitor: “Doctor can you help me? My name is Archer.”

  Doctor: “No, I’m sorry I can’t do a thing for you.”

  —The Grumbler, 1931

  Shoplifting, stealing money from school cloakrooms and YMCA lockers, boosting cars for joyrides, rolling drunks: these were crimes a grown-up Millar ascribed to teen males in autobiographical fiction he drafted. In real life, the teenaged Millar certainly stole. He knew pimps, prostitutes, and other low types from his pool-hall rambles. A scheme for the blue-eyed Millar to work a homosexual badger game, luring adult males into compromising situations, may well have been proposed to him; such a hustle also turned up in later fiction notes. At fifteen, Millar looked handsome but haunted, a boy hovering between sexual orientations, chased by furies of good and evil.