Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Despite her and his peculiarities, Millar showed an affection for his wife that was rooted deep. Anna Branson remembered, “Ken was waiting at our place for Maggie to show up one day, and we looked out the window. It was wintertime, and there were snowdrifts out there. And here she was coming up from Division Street towards our house; she had these beautiful, long legs, and she was jumping over the snow piles. And Ken says, ‘Oh, Mar-gee, my sweet Mar-gee,’ with all that affection in his voice. He was the only one she allowed to call her that.”

  Some of Millar’s other attitudes could seem old-fashioned. “Ken was a very moral sort of person,” Anna Branson said. “Very moral. In a sense you got the impression he was out to protect women. I was talking to him about doing the hula. And, you know, the hula is suggestive. I said, ‘I’ve been teaching that to Annie,’ ” the Bransons’ young daughter. “He says, ‘Oh, don’t do that!’ ”

  The Millars had a rather more relaxed attitude toward their own daughter’s upbringing, though. “All she needs is the barest of supervision,” Maggie claimed of nine-year-old Linda, enrolled this winter at Ann Arbor’s Bach School. Her parents always gave Linda the benefit of the doubt. A year before, when she’d stolen money “almost innocently” from the top of a dresser, it was enough for Millar that Linda surrendered the money without fuss. “Her candor has always been lovely,” he thought. Others saw her less idealistically. “Linda was a terror, she really was,” said Anna Branson. “Very pretty girl, and bright. But she rode over people roughshod. She took situations over, Linda did.” One afternoon Anna came home to find Linda Millar playing horsies with seven-year-old Annie Branson: “Linda had made a harness out of a rope and had it around Annie’s arms and was saying, ‘Giddyap!’ Annie turned and saw me, opened her mouth, and just started to bawl.”

  Linda’s play sometimes took a bizarre turn. The black-hatted snow-woman in the Millar’s front yard this frosty winter of 1948-49 had an icicle dagger stabbed in her chest and red nail polish leaking from the frozen wound. (Surely Maggie had a hand in this; an identical snowwoman turned up in the text and on the jacket of a book she later wrote.) When Anna Branson looked closely at the several dolls in the dollhouse in Linda’s attic bedroom, she saw something out of a Charles Addams cartoon: “Every single one of those dolls was sitting in a chair, bound and gagged.”

  The Millars placed few restrictions on their daughter’s reading. After racing through Grimms’ tales and Louisa May Alcott, Linda turned to adult fare like Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and her parents’ works. Soon Linda Millar was writing her own “strange misspelt tales of madness and retribution,” as her father described them. “Boy, this is really gruesome,” her mother overheard her as Linda scribbled, “just like The Three Roads.”

  A couple of things happened to Linda and Margaret Millar in Ann Arbor that ruined the year for them. Both incidents were accidents—but the psychologists, and the Millars, didn’t believe in “accidents.”

  The first occurred one noon after Margaret dropped Ken off at the university. The two had a tense exchange before Maggie drove away. A few minutes later she ran their car into a truck. A pair of ice skates on the dashboard hit her forehead, causing a cut that needed stitches. Millar thought this must have reminded Linda of the time she’d seen him hit Maggie’s brow and draw blood—and that this new wound set the psychic stage for what happened the next day.

  Linda was looking forward to a visit from her old Ann Arbor teacher, the woman who’d been her Santa Barbara nanny. At the last minute the woman canceled. A dejected Linda climbed the stairs to her bedroom, slipped on a doll, fell downstairs, and broke her left arm—the same arm broken the year before. She was brought to the university hospital where, without consulting her parents, doctors took bone from her hip to repair a cyst found in the broken arm. The operation was botched and had to be repeated later in California. Linda’s arm was in a cast for months, and Margaret blamed Ken: if he hadn’t caused them to be in Ann Arbor, these things would never have happened.

  Adding to this year’s disappointment was Millar’s acknowledgment that Winter Solstice was stillborn. He shelved the novel rather than suffer the pain of having Mr. or Mrs. Knopf reject it.

  On the other hand, his Coleridge dissertation was being called a triumph. Thorpe and others were certain “The Inward Eye” was Millar’s ticket to any university post he wanted.

  He was 250 pages into the dissertation when, in March 1949, Knopf mailed Millar an advance finished copy of John Macdonald’s The Moving Target. Anthony Boucher, about to start covering mystery fiction for the New York Times Book Review, also received an early copy of the Archer novel. Without naming Target, Millar had earlier tipped Boucher that he’d done a pseudonymous book for Knopf. Boucher picked Target to review, then wrote Ann Arbor and asked if “Macdonald” was Millar. Boucher enclosed his forthcoming Book Review piece on Target, which began, “Just at the time that the tough genre in fiction needs revitalizing, John Macdonald turns up.” Boucher praised the book’s “outstanding freshness” and said its author, “as a weaver of words and an observer of people, stands head and shoulders above . . . his competitors.” Macdonald and Archer, he concluded, “have given the tough tec a new lease on life.”

  Millar had gone out of his way to cultivate Boucher, corresponding with him, revealing his high-minded goal to use the detective story as an instrument of moral good, trading ribald limericks. Millar hand-carried a copy of the American Mercury with his mainstream short story to San Francisco so Boucher would be sure to see it; he was quick to thank Boucher for all printed kindnesses to his and Maggie’s books. Boucher encouraged Millar with private comments and suggestions. He was impressed with Millar’s abilities and seemed his biggest fan. After reading The Moving Target, critic told author, “You can write like a son of a bitch.” As Boucher became the country’s most influential mystery reviewer, his support would prove crucial to Macdonald’s reputation.

  Yes, Millar now told Boucher, of course he was “Macdonald.” The pseudonym had been Knopf’s idea, he disingenuously claimed: “I fell in with the plan because I want to try a serious novel . . . and if I let Macdonald do the mysteries, there won’t be any interference (as there has been in Maggie’s case).”

  When Boucher’s review was published in April, Knopf capitalized by taking a Times ad quoting it in full. Boucher found more occasions to praise Target. In a summer Times roundup he called it “the most human and disturbing novel of the hard-boiled school in many years.” In Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, he said Target was for him “the high point of recent American books. . . . You can put this on your Hammett-Chandler shelf; it won’t be at all out of place in that company.”

  Boucher wasn’t the only critic impressed by The Moving Target. His colleague James Sandoe (winner of a 1949 Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his Chicago Sun-Times reviews) thought enough of Target to bring it to Raymond Chandler’s attention. “An astonishing book has come from Knopf,” Sandoe wrote Chandler in La Jolla (where the Chandlers had moved in 1946, becoming near neighbors of Max Miller), “it’s pure pastiche and Macdonald has clearly read you with scrupulous care for it’s the nearest thing to your fairly striking manner that I’ve met for all the boys that have tried to manage it.” The book “must, fundamentally, be a phoney,” Sandoe said, but “it disguised the fact better than I could possibly have anticipated.” He asked what Chandler thought of it.

  Raymond Chandler claimed not to mind Target’s similarities to The Thin Man and to his own The Big Sleep, but he said he found the “pretentiousness” of its phrasing “rather repellant.” The book’s author affected a strained prose in order to seem literate, Chandler told Sandoe: “A car is ‘acned with rust,’ not spotted. Scribblings on toilet walls are ‘graffiti’ (we know Italian yet, it says); one refers to ‘podex osculation’ (medical Latin too, ain’t we hell?). ‘The seconds piled up precariously like a tower of poker chips,’ etc. The simile that does n
ot quite come off because it doesn’t understand what the purpose of the simile is.” This, Chandler said, showed “the stylistic misuse of language, and I think that certain writers are under a compulsion to write in recherché phrases as a compensation for a lack of some kind of natural animal emotion. They feel nothing, they are literary eunuchs, and therefore they fall back on oblique terminology to prove their distinction. It is the sort of mind that keeps avant garde magazines alive.”

  Chandler’s quibbles ring hollow. Graffiti is not so obscure; it holds up better than recherché. Podex osculation wasn’t pretentious; it was code for an earthy phrase Alfred Knopf wouldn’t print. For all its youthful flaws, Target fairly throbs with emotion; and its similes are no more off-center than many of Chandler’s (“acned with rust” seems fine). Clearly, the old master, faced with Sandoe’s praise of Target, was at pains to find fault with the young pretender. Significantly, Sandoe wasn’t put off; he reviewed The Moving Target positively, calling it “the most creditable [Chandler] imitation I have read and a narrative that keeps one steadily absorbed.”

  After such strong reviews and the Mystery Guild sale, Target was bought for softcover reprint by Pocket Books (Chandler’s own paperback publisher), which meant another two thousand dollars for Millar and Knopf to share. This “run-of-the-mill” work Alfred Knopf at first refused to publish had become Millar’s most successful book. He was back in the writing game, and eager to get out of the academy. Getting his doctorate would take another semester, and none of the Millars wanted to stay in Ann Arbor for that. In June 1949, Kenneth, Margaret, and Linda packed up the Chevy and once more headed West.

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  All I really want is to be able to write about twenty books in about twenty years.

  —Kenneth Millar to Blanche Knopf

  The picaresque or something like it is about the only convention you can use to describe Southern California life as she is lived.

  —Kenneth Millar to Pat Knopf

  With The Moving Target, Millar was beginning to make a name for himself: the assumed name of John Macdonald. He was non-plussed then to hear from another thriller writer with a similar byline: one John D. MacDonald, of Utica, New York. This MacDonald said he’d been publishing for three and a half years and had sold dozens of stories to slick magazines and detective pulps. The Moving Target was causing him professional confusion, MacDonald claimed in a letter to Harold Ober: “Even my mother bought a copy, thinking I wrote it.” A “bit of gumshoe work” led him to guess Target’s author might be “a Mr. Kenneth Millar—whose work I admire very much by the way.” If Ober’s Millar was Macdonald, Utica’s MacDonald said, would he please pick a new pseudonym pronto. “For the life of me,” concluded John D. MacDonald (not a pseudonym), “I can’t understand why he, or anyone, should choose to write under such a thoroughly undistinguished name anyway.”

  Millar hardly needed this problem. Privately he blamed the Ober agents for not having checked authors’ indexes. With the good press ink he’d earned as “John Macdonald” and a second Lew Archer tale already half-done, Millar wasn’t about to give up his alter ego. What he would do, he told Ober, was add a middle initial; he’d be John R. Macdonald. Together with the difference in their last names’ spelling, that ought to keep the two writers separate. John D. MacDonald (who’d also have a long and successful career) agreed that this should do the trick. “Please thank Mr. Millar for me,” he wrote Ober, “and also tell him that I have consistently enjoyed his work, particularly BLUE CITY and THE MOVING TARGET.”

  Millar was now decisively launched, professionally and psychologically, on a Lew Archer series. Though he felt guilty at postponing more serious writing, the private-eye books would let him master the mystery form and make a living at the same time. He could match Margaret in royalties if not in art. And the detective genre held an appeal more basic and immediate for him as a writer than mainstream fiction: he felt the hard-boiled tradition in general, and the private-eye form in particular, were still open to development—that he could still do things with it, even if all he ended up doing was making it a bit more medium-boiled. “I wanted to write as well as I possibly could,” he’d explain in 1953, “to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.”

  He didn’t feel a bit handicapped as a non-Californian trying to write private-eye stories set in the Golden State. Crime was crime, wherever it took place, and he’d seen or heard about plenty of it since he was a kid. His mother’s father’s family had been all but ruined once by a defaulting store employee. Margaret’s kin had suffered from a family member’s forgeries. While in the navy, Millar later obliquely told a journalist, “I took the confession of murder by someone I knew.” The trauma of his own mother’s death was something Millar could incorporate into his mystery stories. When a new Santa Barbara friend, a fellow Canadian named Hugh Kenner, asked where Millar had found out so much about Americans, Millar told him, “In Ontario.”

  Which wasn’t to say Millar didn’t give California’s denizens his closest scrutiny. He viewed the Santa Barbara natives with a novelist’s curiosity and an outsider’s wariness. Among the most restless natives were those in the wealthy adjacent village of Montecito. This was a dangerous social set: witty and accomplished, but reckless in pursuit of pleasure. “Montecito was a hotbed of hard drinking, wife-swapping, and all kinds of scandalous stuff,” said magazine writer Al Stump, another new friend of the Millars’. “I suppose it was a little like Hollywood in the twenties: you couldn’t go to a party there without having coke thrown at you. Montecito was kind of a disgrace to the rest of the town.” The second Lew Archer book, The Drowning Pool, was full of Montecito types.

  The novel began with a visit to Archer’s Hollywood office by Mrs. Maude Slocum, who’s concerned about an anonymous letter sent her husband from Quinto, sixty miles north of LA. The letter (intercepted by Mrs. Slocum) accuses her of adultery. She fears more such letters may cause scandal and divorce; Maude wants to protect her teenaged daughter. Archer agrees to help.

  Soon he’s in the Santa Barbara-like town of Quinto, “Jewel of the Sea,” population twenty-five thousand. Quinto’s quaint Spanish architecture seems an unreal stage setting to Archer. The artificiality heightens when he sees Mrs. Slocum’s dilettante husband, James, rehearsing with a semiprofessional theater troupe. Slocum’s a thin, sensitive fellow in a yellow turtleneck; Archer loathes him at first sight. The private eye watches Slocum and cast run through “the kind of play that only a mother or an actor could love, the kind of stuff that parodied itself,” in a witty vignette that skewers fake sophistication. To wash off the psychic residue, Archer goes for a swim in Millar’s beloved Pacific: “They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through the mountains, cut down a thousand years of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn’t touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn’t be tainted.” So it seemed in 1949.

  In ugly contrast to the refreshing sea is the corrupted paradise of Nopal Valley, where the Slocums live. Nopal stinks of the oil and sulfur gas responsible for its tumorous growth. “A quiet town in a sunny valley had hit the jackpot hard,” Archer observes, “and didn’t know what to do with itself at all.” On a mesa far above the herd dwell the Slocums in a house that hums with tension. James’s mother rules the roost with “enough ego to equip a dictator” and keeps her son on a short-money leash. Sixteen-year-old Cathy Slocum, intellectually precocious but emotionally vulnerable, has her jealous mother cowed and her high-strung father acting like an incestuous suitor. The family order is badly awry.

  Intruding further between husband and wife is Francis Marvell, an Oxford-educated poet-playwright who’s usurped James Slocum’s affections. With his skittish walk and “his Adam’s apple bobbing like a soft egg c
aught in his throat,” Marvell (namesake of a famous English poet) is the image of Wystan Auden. When he crosses his legs, Marvell shows thin legs “pale and hairless above the drooping socks.” Marvell and several other acidly sketched types chatter through a set piece of a cocktail party. Like the most jaded Montecito-ites, they drop a litany of trendy names (Capote, Gide, Anaïs Nin, Djuna Barnes) and are obsessed with sex: “Sex solo, in duet, trio, quartet; for all-male chorus; for choir and symphony; and played on the harpsichord in three-fourths time. And Albert Schweitzer and the dignity of everything that lives.”

  Providing social if not comic relief is Pat Reavis, the Slocums’ vainly handsome chauffeur, with whom Archer has drinks. Thumbnail sketch of a California phony: “He told me how he was promoted in the field on Guadalcanal, to become the youngest captain in the whole Pacific. How the OSS heard of his prowess and gave him a hush-hush assignment tracking down spies and saboteurs. How the Saturday Evening Post offered him several thousand dollars for an article about his personal experiences, but he was sworn to secrecy.” When the police come with news of a murder at the Slocums’, Reavis disappears.

  In search of the chauffeur, Archer seeks out seventeen-year-old Gretchen, a “fallen angel” who works the Romp Room, a dive even more depraved than The Moving Target’s Wild Piano. Gretchen preserves a kind of innocence in her sordid surroundings but pays for it with early-morning “screaming meemies.” Archer feels like a pander coaxing information from her. As in Target, the detective catches a sleazy glimpse of himself: “the shadow-figure without a life of his own,” peering “through dirty glass at the dirty lives of people in a very dirty world.” Millar’s private eye, with his unflattering self-knowledge, is sharply different from Chandler’s Marlowe, whose romantic loneliness tends to self-pity.