Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Margaret played on Millar’s discontents and urged he leave the academy, do what she’d done, be a full-time writer. Having dropped out of university herself, she seemed to see his college career as a prolonged evasion of responsibility. Maybe she was right: Millar was ashamed of his lack of courage, his failure to assume “true headship” of the family. The more he achieved at Michigan, the more Margaret hammered away. Shortly after he won a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship (which carried a sum of $875), Margaret burst in on a conversation he and Pearce were having at the Hill Street house. “We were talking,” Pearce recalled, “a bit too loudly it seems, about some of the things he’d been reading or that had been taught by some of the teachers; it was the kind of conversation Margaret could simply not endure. She came in and shouted at him, ‘Einstein! Einstein!’ He’d just got the highest university fellowship they gave; she couldn’t forgive him for that. We left soon, and as we walked toward school together, I being a bit embarrassed, he said to me—and this was the only negative thing he ever said about her in my presence—he said, ‘You know, I don’t think Margaret respects me as much as she should.’ ”

  Alone with his wife, Millar wasn’t so placid. He and Margaret shouted, broke dishes, shoved and slapped each other. Maggie blamed Ken for his rotten temper, but she had one to match. Once she threw an egg at him; when he ducked, it splattered on the wall, where she left it to dry. Another time she dropped a typewriter from a second-story window. Mornings were touchy as Millar readied Linda for school and Margaret supervised from bed, often telling him he was doing things all wrong. One such morning he threw a rubber doll at Margaret, and its detachable head came off. She accused him of breaking his daughter’s toy. He hit her and caused a cut over her eye. They called a doctor and made up something about an accident. Linda saw it all. To his lifelong shame, Millar sometimes shook or slapped Linda, in misplaced anger at her mother. Linda was the prize her parents fought for. The family was deranged somehow, and all three knew it.

  Millar’s tensions sometimes came out in spooky fashion. Talking late one night to Pearce on an Ann Arbor street, Millar said calmly, “A specter has been standing beside us all during this conversation. I think it was my mother.” Another time when Pearce knocked at the Hill Street door unexpectedly one afternoon, Millar slowly opened it only an inch and peered warily with one eye through the crack. “I don’t know what he was nervous or anxious about,” Pearce said, “but it was as if he was a pursued person.”

  Margaret had her own odd fears. “She was always nervous when there were other women around,” said Marianne Meisel. “She was always afraid I was going to snatch Ken. And Ken was not flirtatious.” Anna Branson agreed: “I really think he trod the straight and narrow. He liked to think of himself as a boulevardier, a philanderer, something like that—but he wasn’t!” Margaret’s anxieties weren’t restricted to women, Pearce recalled: “Margaret was talking about W. H. Auden having been over to the house. ‘Oh, I just hated his black teeth, and his self-importance,’ she said. ‘Moreover, his pant leg slid up his shin, and here was this bare stretch of absolutely hairless leg. It was terrible!’ And she said, ‘Pearce, pull your pant leg up.’ I pulled my pant leg up. She said, ‘That’s exactly what a man’s leg should look like!’ Well, a few years later I learned in a letter from Bob Ford that Margaret thought I was a latent homosexual in love with Ken, because I was so devoted to him in many ways. Apparently she had been uneasy with me for a long time, from the first time she set eyes on me I think. But when she asked me to exhibit my leg and saw that it was adequately hairy, that relieved her of any problem that she had regarding me, and I was a welcome person after that.”

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  And Margaret Millar has just presented to the many campus “who-done-it” bugs her fourth thriller, an ingenious mystery, full of psychological analysis and sly satire. Only the other day we caught Ken Millar in front of the Arcade newsstand anxiously scanning the New Yorker’s book review column. If we may judge by his expression, the review was favorable.

  —University of Michigan English Department Newsletter, September 7, 1943

  MYSTERY AND CRIME

  WALL OF EYES, by Margaret Millar.

  . . . Inspector Sands works out a very neat solution and, in his quiet way, turns out to be the kind of detective it would be nice to meet more often. Highly recommended.

  —The New Yorker, September 4, 1943

  Things had gone well for Margaret: the Toronto Star paid to serialize two of her books, and reprint editions brought the Millars a few more hundred dollars. Sales of her third title were twice those of her second, and reviewers especially liked her. Doubleday’s Isabelle Taylor told Margaret she had “a definite reputation and standing in mystery fiction.”

  All that seemed in doubt, though, when she submitted Wall of Eyes to Doubleday Doran in late 1942. Margaret had dropped her psychiatristsleuth Dr. Prye for a dour Toronto police detective, Inspector Sands. Instead of a light semicomedy, Wall of Eyes was a grimly realistic and sometimes shocking tale of neurotic characters. Taylor and staff were not pleased with this radical departure. The editor’s verdict was blunt: “It doesn’t come off.” She advised Margaret Millar to chalk this one up to experience and quickly write another lighthearted tale.

  But Margaret believed in Wall of Eyes, as did Millar. She’d begun corresponding with romance novelist Faith Baldwin, a mystery addict who’d written Maggie after seeing her name mentioned in The Weak-Eyed Bat. Margaret told Baldwin of her trouble with Doubleday, and the best-selling Baldwin said she should get an agent. Baldwin recommended her own: Harold Ober, a well-known New York rep whose clients included William Faulkner and the late F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ober read Margaret’s published books, signed her, and immediately sold Wall of Eyes to Bennett Cerf’s Random House for an advance of five hundred dollars—twice what Doubleday had been giving her. What was nearly a setback had become a career move. Wall of Eyes was scheduled for publication in September 1943.

  Margaret complained even more now of Millar’s domestic failings. She scolded him for not spending enough time with his family, especially Linda. Margaret herself did her best for their daughter, but with her constant writing she didn’t have time for Linda either. And Linda seemed to need extra attention these days. Things weren’t good for the three-year-old in her new nursery school, with its “progressive” policy of letting kids fight out their differences. Linda became withdrawn and distrustful. A disturbing thing happened while she was home sick with a cough: she swallowed a pint of codeine syrup and had to have her stomach pumped.

  Margaret also criticized Millar’s college career, an expensive endeavor that (no matter how many fellowships he won) Margaret’s mysteries were bankrolling. He was done with his courses for the doctorate by mid-1943 and would finish grad school with an A-plus average; all he needed to get his Ph.D. was to write a dissertation. But Millar was depressed by the academic game and restless and guilty on campus with so many men gone off to war. Encouraged by Margaret, he came up with a plan to postpone his dissertation: he’d try for a U.S. Navy commission, which would fulfill his urge to take part in the war effort and (not incidentally) earn an officer’s wage that could stake him later to a year’s writing.

  Margaret’s Random House signing may have played a part in his decision. With her serious new book and her fine new publisher, Maggie was bounding ahead in their writerly competition. “While we were very very proud of each other,” she said, “I think there was an element of keeping up with the other guy that was very helpful.”

  In spring 1943, Millar went to the Book Tower Building in Detroit to secure his commission in the Naval Reserve. He didn’t get it. A nervous stomach and an ulcer (the results, he figured, of grad school stress) caused the navy to turn Millar down. He wouldn’t be leaving Michigan after all. Reluctantly, he resumed teaching duties. In the summer of ’43 these included a section of premeteorology for air force officer candidates: the
same sort of commissioned men whose ranks he’d been kept out of. The irony couldn’t have pleased Ken Millar.

  Frustration inspired him to turn rejection into opportunity. After helping plot and edit Maggie’s books, Millar felt he’d gotten the hang of writing mysteries. He’d steal time this summer to write his own thriller.

  Having no spare hours during the day, he took time from the evenings. Telling almost no one what he was about, he hid for two hours each night in his office in Angell Hall, which was otherwise empty. He’d be Mr. Hyde, exploring his “dark side” after the day’s Dr. Jekyll–like work. His goal was ten pages a night, for a book in a month. It was a race (within the larger one with Margaret) to the start of the new school term, and publication that month of Wall of Eyes.

  John Buchan, whose Toronto talk inspired Millar to start writing for magazines (and gave him his tortoise-and-hare metaphor for his and Margaret’s careers), influenced Millar’s first book The Dark Tunnel: a spy story that bore some resemblance to Buchan’s classic The Thirty-Nine Steps. Another writer, Raymond Chandler, had an equally powerful effect on this work.

  Chandler had become a favorite of Millar’s (and of any number of other smart readers, Auden included). Whenever a new Chandler book with private detective Philip Marlowe was published (for instance, The High Window, in August 1942), Millar hastened to the Ann Arbor rental library to reserve it. He loved Chandler’s colorful style and the excited revulsion with which Chandler described the sins and perils of southern California. After being drilled for years in dry scholarship, Millar found Chandler’s exuberance liberating. The effect of Chandler can be seen in The Dark Tunnel’s rough-and-ready humor, its extravagant similes, and its more lurid events and descriptions (such as the egg-cracking sound of a skull hitting pavement).

  Millar’s mystery, like Chandler’s most recent one, had a victim being thrown from a high window. In Millar’s tale the window was the type in Angell Hall, and he devised an inventive murder method that took advantage of this window’s tip-up design.

  Millar adapted other aspects of the Michigan campus for his story, a domestic-espionage tale set at “Midwestern University” in “Arbana,” near Detroit. A major sequence took place in a network of underground steam tunnels like the one that connected several U of M buildings. Access to these tunnels was forbidden to all but engineers; wartime sabotage was a concern. A night watchman patrolled the locked entryways. Millar made up his mind to explore these passages as research for his book. Timing the watchman’s route and using skills acquired as a Kitchener teenager, the assistant professor and would-be novelist got into the tunnels, took his notes, and escaped. The fearful thrill he must have felt found its way palpably into the scenes he immediately wrote.

  The Dark Tunnel took shape as a hybrid of old-fashioned puzzle-mystery, Buchanesque spy adventure, and Chandleresque exposé of sexual perversion. Its professor hero, Robert Branch, like Millar, is a democratic intellectual who appreciates all sorts of culture: Norse myth, Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, W. C. Handy. Like his creator, Branch straddles social worlds and contains contradictions: a Ph.D. who can jimmy a Yale lock, a Heraclitus quoter who trades quips with cabdrivers. A hard-boiled egghead, Branch cracks wise in a brainy way—as when he tells a dull-witted cop, “I want to talk to a detective who isn’t moribund above the coccyx.” The physically manic side of the Millar who could hang outside a third-story window or twirl someone above his head found prose expression in Branch’s words and deeds.

  When Millar’s manuscript was done and typed, he sent it to Ivan von Auw at the Harold Ober Agency; without any difficulty, von Auw placed the book with Dodd, Mead, to be published in 1944 in its Red Badge mystery line. The secretive Millar now told friends and colleagues what he’d been up to. “He was rather smug and pleased,” Marianne Meisel said, “because the darn thing got bought immediately! That was pleasant to see.” Wasting no time, Millar began another novel, a collaboration with James Meisel about a con man in Nazi Germany. The men finished a manuscript of one hundred thousand words, which von Auw also represented. Although it didn’t sell (interest in Germany was waning even before the end of the war), it received flattering rejections (from Houghton Mifflin and Knopf) and boosted Millar’s confidence.

  Buoyed by his achievements, he applied again for a navy commission. His health hadn’t changed, but the service’s standards had; this time Millar made it. When Margaret’s Wall of Eyes was published to fine notices (the New York Times Book Review made it a “New Books for Christmas” recommendation), Millar had things of his own to be proud of: a first novel sold, and a job to break him out of academe. Millar’s life would never be the same.

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  Everyone else looks pretty shoddy to me, darling. Saps & weaklings & dumbbells & liars & hypocrites. You can’t realize what you mean to me . . . what you don’t know is how I admire you, & respect you & look up to you.

  —Margaret to Kenneth, 1945

  The waiter just brought me my third bottle of beer. It tastes very good indeed when you get it only Saturday night. Don’t tell me values aren’t conditioned by environment.

  —Kenneth to Margaret, 1944

  Millar was at Harvard when his novel came out—not working toward a Ph.D., as he’d once hoped to be doing there, but studying to be a naval communications officer. It had taken a world war to get Millar into the school that had rejected his fellowship application in 1938. However tangential his stay, Millar was eager to make the most of the opportunity. The new ensign threw himself into his work as wholeheartedly as he had in an earlier two-month stretch at Princeton. Though he hated typing, he forced himself to achieve the required proficiency; and he managed to master Morse code in fifteen minutes instead of the regulation fifteen days.

  Margaret and Linda relocated with him to Massachusetts, as they’d first followed him (with Linda’s good Ann Arbor nursery school teacher and Margaret’s sister, a nurse on leave from the Canadian Army) to Princeton. During that New Jersey posting, the Millar entourage stayed on Mercer Street in the rented house of Listerine manufacturer Gerard Lambert, a few doors away from the genius whose name Margaret sometimes took in vain: Albert Einstein. When Millar transferred to Harvard, the Millars moved to an apartment in Belmont, Massachusetts, an hour’s trolley ride from the Cambridge campus. That’s where they were in September 1944 when Dodd, Mead brought out The Dark Tunnel.

  Millar’s first book got its share of praise in the special review columns and roundups to which 1940s mystery fiction was consigned. The New York Times called it “a thrilling story told with consummate skill,” the Chicago Sun praised its “politically progressive views” and “anti-reactionary ironies,” and the New Republic (one of Millar’s favorite magazines) said it was “a humdinger—and well written to boot.” In December, the Saturday Review’s mystery critic judged The Dark Tunnel “the best ‘suspense’ yarn of the year.”

  By then Millar was not only a published author but a naval communications officer. Ensign Millar traveled with his wife and daughter by Santa Fe train from Michigan to the West Coast. Given his pick of postings, he’d chosen the Eleventh Naval District, headquartered in San Diego, where his parents once lived. Primed by his mother’s stories, Millar would finally see California.

  After he’d reported for duty, the Millars stayed a month in the oceanfront town of La Jolla, at the Cabrillo Hotel. Ken and Margaret enjoyed themselves thoroughly: swimming in the Pacific, watching seals frolic on the beach, dancing at night to the Cabrillo’s orchestra, taking day trips to Tijuana. They met La Jolla writer Max Miller, author of I Cover the Waterfront and other best-sellers, who showed them his second-floor office with its mesmerizing ocean view. These California weeks made a strong impression on Millar. He didn’t feel he’d “come home” exactly, but he did think this was a place he could live with pleasure. His wife and daughter liked it too. Margaret wanted to move to La Jolla.

  Such a notion, unthinkable a year ago
, was actually an option. Margaret Millar’s latest manuscript, a psychological thriller called The Iron Gates, had caused a stir at Random House, which planned an optimistic first printing of eighty-five hundred copies. If the book did well, the Millars might earn enough to live here. Margaret couldn’t imagine a better place than California for Millar to be a writer.

  Margaret and Linda stayed on the West Coast when a British ship took Millar in February to Pearl Harbor to join the crew of the USS Shipley Bay, an aircraft carrier making regular runs from Hawaii to Samar and Luzon. Ensign Millar would be in charge of all ship’s coding, but he planned to start a second thriller for Dodd, Mead in his spare hours. When he began a book in March, his mind was still filled with La Jolla and San Diego. He wrote Margaret, “The only place I imagine with automatic ease is Southern California.”

  Blending with Millar’s firsthand California impressions were ones he’d gotten from Raymond Chandler’s writing; Millar’s interest in Chandler was still keen (he urged Margaret to mail him a new Chandler book if one came out). Now Chandler’s vision filled the movie screen, in a film of James Cain’s Double Indemnity, written by Chandler with director Billy Wilder. The Shipley Bay’s crew saw Double Indemnity in March, and Millar thought it “really first-class.” A few weeks later he got another shipboard shot of Chandler in Murder, My Sweet, a movie of Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely that starred Dick Powell as detective Philip Marlowe. Millar took a break from his thriller writing to watch it (“I couldn’t miss that show”) and found it “good, though not so good as Double Indemnity: didn’t have the drama and was a bit confusing. But lots of good violence and cynicism and stuff, and funny dialogue: they told it the same way as Double Indemnity—I could stand to see more of the same.”