Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Avery Brundage, head of the International Olympic Committee, was a prominent Santa Barbara resident in the fifties. “He was the kingpin of the Olympic Games,” said Stump, “widely disliked for his stand on amateurism; he kicked a lotta guys off the Olympic team if they took one dime. Ken saw me writing a story on him I think for Liberty magazine and said he’d like to meet Brundage. But I was afraid he might say something like, ‘I notice you live in a mansion in Santa Barbara, while some of these poor athletes are starving to death. You can’t put a dollar price on the muscle, and why should they bother?’ They might get into a hot argument, so I didn’t arrange that they meet.”

  Stump did get Millar together with former world welterweight boxing champion Jimmy McLarnin, he said: “Ken was thrilled. McLarnin had won his title in LA at a big fight at Gilmore Field back in 1933. Now it’s the fifties, but Ken’s still as enthused as a little kid going to meet Babe Ruth. And Jimmy—God bless the little guy, he took terrible beatings in the ring, but he held on—Jimmy was a Canadian too, born in Ireland but raised in Vancouver and Victoria. They had a lot in common, and they had a good talk. Jimmy showed Ken a couple professional moves, how to slip a punch for instance: instead of ducking it, you just move your head left or right and it goes by your ear.” This head dodge would help Lew Archer through many fistfights.

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  Millar was well into the writing of his third Archer manuscript—a work he promised would be “a more human book than either of the others, more original, not so slick, and a truer picture of our very messed-up society”—when The Drowning Pool was published in July 1950. Pool was dedicated “TO TONY,” by way of covertly thanking Anthony Boucher for his kindness to The Moving Target (which had no dedicatee). The Drowning Pool went a step further in separating Millar’s work from the prolific John D. MacDonald’s: on this second Archer, the pseudonym changed to John Ross Macdonald. Ross was a name Millar liked; his life was full of Rosses. His Winnipeg aunt Margaret’s adopted son’s middle name was Ross. Maggie had a brother named Ross. One of Millar’s oldest friends was Donald Ross Pearce, middle-named for Pearce’s godfather, Canadian House of Commons Speaker Ross Macdonald.

  Pool was praised in the magazine and newspaper mystery roundup columns. “As it’s a long time since Hammett and a long time between Chandlers,” wrote Chandler correspondent James Sandoe in the Chicago Sun-Times, “it is more than agreeable to have fastidious prose set forth upon a hardboiled framework.” Knopf promoted Pool with eye-catching little ads in the major book reviews, but the book didn’t do well. By late September, when Millar was writing the final pages of its successor, The Drowning Pool had sold less than four thousand copies.

  The average hardcover mystery sale in 1950, even for first novels, was about three thousand, as Millar learned from the Mystery Writers of America newsletter. Detective fiction was increasingly popular: one in four Americans claimed to be a mystery fan, according to a Gallup poll; and over half the country’s college grads said they liked crime fiction. But these readers more and more preferred mysteries in pocket-size softbound editions rather than hardcover. Paperback printings jumped from 66 million in 1945 to 214 million in 1950, with mysteries being more than a quarter of that 1950 output.

  Millar benefited from these trends. A softcover house called Lion reprinted his two first Dodd, Mead books in 1950. Dell did a paperback edition of Blue City, which proved such a good seller that Dell also did The Three Roads. And Pocket Books of course had the Lew Archer titles.

  Millar’s work was also available in Europe. “He told me he was a bestseller in France,” said Hugh Kenner. “His early books would translate into French very easily, into an idiom related to that of Baudelaire.” Millar’s À feu et à sang (Blue City) was the thirtieth book in Gallimard’s hugely successful Série Noire line, which also reprinted Chandler, Cain, and Hammett; each of these hardbound thrillers (which cost less than a dollar) sold a minimum of forty thousand copies, with some selling as many as one hundred thousand.

  Still it was hard to make a living. In 1950 the Millars’ total combined income was $8,428. Their joint adjusted gross for 1951 would be $6,266. With Margaret following her muse where it led, Millar thought he needed to keep his “dependable” Archer series going. “Being a woman and less responsible economically,” he complained mildly to Thorpe, “she can afford greater artistic responsibility, I suppose.” He felt pressure to write more, faster, better. The mental strain expressed itself, as he saw it, through physical illness. Gout periodically crippled his writing arm. In 1950 he had a hemorrhoidectomy. As a longtime reader of Freud, Jung, Horney, Menninger, et al., he interpreted these ailments as a substitute for psychosis. The Korean crisis added to his psychic imbalance: there was a chance Millar would be called to active duty, maybe as a code instructor (though it seemed just as likely his gout would keep him home). Millar’s drinking was steady these days and a bit worrying; he attended at least one Alcoholics Anonymous meeting around 1950 and took notes of the guest speaker, later using some of her turns of speech (“muscadoodle” for muscatel) in his books.

  The Millars’ eleven-year-old endured her share of physical and mental ordeals this season, including an arm operation to rectify the botched bone graft done the last year in Ann Arbor. Linda handled this with stoic good grace, but her aunt’s 1951 marriage upset her unduly. Maggie’s sister had been a kind of surrogate mother to Linda for the past five years; now Linda felt deserted and betrayed. She stole a key one morning and snuck into her aunt’s apartment before dawn, then fled without being seen. When the couple woke, they thought burglars had broken in. When Millar questioned Linda in private, she confessed. He said he understood, that he’d done wrong too when he was her age. He didn’t tell the newlyweds Linda had been their intruder.

  Her school problems grew worse, and in June 1951 she and her parents met with a counselor to discuss Linda’s “maladjustment” due to “negativistic” traits. Millar defended his daughter, saying “he thought it was normal for Linda to show an interest in morbid subjects, in that he himself had similar interests.” Maggie acknowledged using Linda as a basis for characters sometimes, especially the nine-year-old in 1949’s The Cannibal Heart, whose mother notes, “The clothes, without Jessie in them, were somehow very sweet; they conjured up a Jessie without faults, a sleeping child innocent as heaven. It was a shock to come unexpectedly on the real Jessie, looking a little sullen, holding her hands behind her back, her eyes brooding with secrets.” Linda Jane (a habitual reader of her parents’ novels) was made uncomfortable by such portraits. Perhaps just as unsettling would be to see her parents in characters who argue and are unhappy: “ ‘We’re not a family—you know what I mean?—and sometimes I think, I can’t help thinking, that Jessie knows that, and that she hates us both.’ ” Her school counselor concluded Linda Millar was “still disturbed” and needed “careful handling.”

  Millar left his family again in 1951 for Ann Arbor and the final work on his Ph.D. He wasn’t the only one wanting to get away. Linda asked if she could go to Michigan too and “keep house.” Her father left town without her of course, boarding the train on Monday, June 18. It was Linda’s twelfth birthday.

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  THE WAY SOME

  PEOPLE DIE

  John Ross Macdonald

  (Knopf: $2.50)

  Summing Up

  The coastal scene and its

  underworld at last treated

  by someone who can write . . .

  Verdict

  Subtle hard-boiled gem

  —Kathleen Sproul, The Saturday Review, 1951

  The problem is the age-old one of how to convert literary or sub-literary excellence into a living income.

  —Ken Millar to Alfred Knopf, 1951

  Having published eight books in the past seven years, Millar was more a novelist than a graduate student in 1951—how much more so was apparent in the opening moments of the defense of his dissert
ation, a marathon event in a room at the University of Michigan’s Angell Hall.

  “The chairman of the graduate committee introduced Ken by saying various things about him as a student and the things he’d done at the university,” said Michigan faculty member Don Pearce, present for the occasion. “It was a pleasant but stiff and pedantic sort of introduction—and he ended by saying, ‘And he also writes murder mysteries.’ ” The chairman’s perfunctory tag failed to do Millar’s fiction justice. Called by the New York Times the best writer of hard-boiled prose since Dashiell Hammett, Millar hardly needed condescension from a Midwestern academic. “He did have this pride, you know, mixed up with an inordinate sort of humility and modesty,” said Pearce. “He had no egotistical side to him atall unless he was rubbed the wrong way, and then he knew his value. And I think Ken was offended by this tiny little mention his writing career had been given, in comparison to his obsolete and by then kind of irrelevant scholarly career.” Millar stood and thanked the chairman and said, “I’d just like to point out that my most recent book”—here Millar slammed a notebook down with a bang—“is called The Way Some People Die.” In the silence that followed, Millar stared significantly at each man present. His meaning seemed clear: certain people were so out of touch they were half-dead already.

  Millar joked to Boucher that he nearly called his dissertation “The Way Some People Die, Volume Two.” Later he’d say what convinced him to be a full-time writer was not wanting to be like the men on his doctoral committee. Surely it would be hard to imagine a tenured fifties Michigan Ph.D. writing as vital a book as The Way Some People Die, which was at once a vivid tableau of postwar southern California and a stylish retelling of certain Greek myths.

  The novel starts with Lew Archer summoned to Santa Monica by Mrs. Lawrence, a gray-haired, black-clad woman speaking the pious phrases of the self-righteously devout and shielding her eyes from the harsh glare of LA reality. Her decaying house with its purple-glass fanlight over the door and its front room stuffed with oppressively heavy pieces might have been transported straight from the Kitchener of Millar’s youth. As Archer sits in her shadowy parlor, he feels himself dragged unpleasantly into the past, assailed by mental images of his own grandmother “in crisp black funeral silks.” Mrs. Lawrence lives “within rifleshot of the sea,” and Archer looks toward the Pacific to chase away unbidden memories; but the ocean in this book delivers not solace and purity but doom.

  Mrs. Lawrence wants Lew to look for her twenty-four-year-old daughter, Galatea, a hospital nurse missing for two months. Galley is frighteningly beautiful, Archer sees from a photo, with “fierce curled lips, black eyes and clean angry bones.” Her chill perfection is worthy of classical sculpture. Greek myth tells of two Galateas, and Galley Lawrence evokes both. One is Pygmalion’s statue come to life: apt symbol for the stone-hearted Galley. The other Galatea is a sea nymph who lures lovers to watery death. Way is drenched in marine imagery, and the ocean is central to its characters: yearning, grasping types who wait for ships (symbolic and real) to come in. Scheming to wreck and pillage those vessels is a merciless nymph hatched in the California heat.

  The mythological allusions needn’t be noticed for The Way Some People Die to be enjoyed as hard-boiled adventure. Where The Drowning Pool and The Three Roads make classical sources explicit, this work plants clues. Millar here put into sophisticated practice his theory of a democratic literature that could be liked on different levels by all sorts of readers.

  From its strong opening in Mrs. Lawrence’s claustrophobic Santa Monica house (matched by a similar scene at book’s end), Way moves south to the La Jolla/San Diego-like Pacific Point, then north to Hollywood. Archer learns Galley’s hooked up with handsome hood Joe Tarantine. At Joe and Galley’s empty apartment off Sunset, Archer’s surprised by a gun-toting thug and driven to a hilltop lair near Pacific Palisades.

  There he meets Mr. Dowser, a short, broad-shouldered mobster in a double-breasted blue suit, whose eyes look “as if they had been dipped in muddy water and stuck on his face to dry.” Grotesque as he is, Dowser seems real, like the porcine Mickey Cohen, an LA crime boss famous in tabloids. Dowser says Tarantine stole something from him; he wants Archer to find Joe and Galley. Archer takes his money to buy his trust. By 10 P.M. (twelve hours after meeting Galley’s mother) Lew’s in Palm Springs, where Galley’s been sighted.

  In a Wild West-themed bar, he finds unemployed actor Keith Dalling, Joe and Galley’s West Hollywood neighbor, who leads him to a house where Galley’s supposed to be—and where Archer’s knocked out. By morning the detective’s back in West Hollywood, at Dalling’s apartment, where he takes in the scene with a camera’s (or painter’s) eye:

  The living-room was dim behind closed Venetian blinds. I jerked the cord to let the morning in, and looked around me. A scarred prewar radio-phonograph stood by the window, with piles of records on the floor beside it. There was a shallow fireplace in the inside wall, containing a cold gas heater unnecessarily protected by a brass fire-screen. On the wall above the fireplace Van Gogh’s much reproduced sunflowers burned in a bamboo frame. The mantel held some old copies of Daily Variety and Hollywood Reporter, and a few books: cheap reprints of Thorne Smith, Erskine Caldwell, the poems of Joseph Moncure March, and The Lost Weekend. There was one handsome book, a copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese bound in green tooled leather. Its flyleaf was inscribed: “If thou must love me, let it be for naught except for love’s sake only.—Jane.” Jane wrote a precise small hand.

  The most conspicuous piece of furniture was a Murphy bed standing on its hind legs in a doorway across the room. I had to push it aside before I could get through the door. I did this with my elbow, instead of my fingerprint surfaces. I suppose I smelled the blood before I was conscious of it.

  This third Archer book is full of such color glossies of California interiors circa 1950. Archer is as good at reading character through decor as through physiognomy, and his photomurals include just the right trompe l’oeil details.

  In later years Millar would be less concerned with documenting the California scene and more rooted in timeless themes of personal guilts, but much of the vitality of the early Archers comes from the immediacy with which they describe “the endless city” from San Diego to Santa Barbara to San Francisco. Like a hard-boiled Balzac, Archer travels high and low, cruising ritzy Strip cribs, seedy waterfront fleabags, movie factories, squalid nightclubs. The Way Some People Die was one of his greatest tours, a dark Technicolor travelogue filled with striking scenes: a wrestling match in a stifling arena, a face-off with a repellent drug peddler, a violent fight with a murderer.

  Way had a lot going for it: an exciting plot in which Archer solves murders and foils a heroin racket, a host of well-drawn characters, and a surreal “death by water” that fast-froze Greek myth to West Coast consumer culture. Again Archer went out of his way to help a troubled female teenager, an addict headed down a sordid road.

  Way was written with great assurance and style. In moving away from his “personal neuroses” (as he saw it) and more into hard-boiled terrain, Millar reached a new level of achievement. To many crime-fiction critics and writers, The Way Some People Die became the book to match or beat. It was a knockout, a humdinger. With his third private-eye novel, Millar—“John Ross Macdonald”—wrote a genre classic.

  It drew raves this summer of 1951. James Sandoe, reviewing now for the New York Herald Tribune, said, “Macdonald can write really well and his book follows the hard-boiled pattern with a rare freshness and originality.” Lenore Glen Offord assured her San Francisco Chronicle readers, “The tough ones don’t come any better than this.” Boucher, as usual the most eloquent and extravagant champion, stated, “Macdonald has the makings of a novelist of serious caliber—in his vivid realization of locale; in his striking prose style, reminiscent of Chandler and yet suggesting the poetic evocation of Kenneth Fearing; in his moving three-dimensional characterization; and above all in his strangely just attitude towa
rd human beings, which seems incredibly to fuse the biting contempt of a Swift with the embracing love of a Saroyan.” This new Macdonald, he wrote, was “the best novel in the tough tradition that I’ve read since Farewell, My Lovely . . . and possibly since The Maltese Falcon.”

  Sending thanks from Ann Arbor, Millar wrote Boucher (now president of the Mystery Writers of America), “An element of smugness enters in from the fact that I’ve finished [Way’s] successor . . . and you ain’t seen nothing yet. No kidding.”

  The fourth Archer (working title The Split Woman, published as The Ivory Grin) was done under the conscious influence of Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, and Millar felt it his “biggest” novel yet. One night at his rented Ann Arbor apartment, Millar held forth to Don Pearce on the book’s serious theme.

  “He spent quite a bit of time explaining to me the nature of the Miltonic split, as he called it,” said Pearce, “and the damage that Milton had done to English-speaking civilization by driving home the notion that woman was the bearer of evil in our culture: you know, ‘It was Eve’s fault.’ Ken said women as a result of this disparagement and devaluation are uncompleted beings, and as a result of that, men are incomplete too—because it’s a very close symbiotic polar relationship between the sexes, and if one of them is denied full identity and freedom, the other inevitably suffers. You know this sounds very modern, but he was saying it real early, long before I’d ever heard it from anyone else in any serious way. And he had a real theory and thesis about all this, backed up by a good deal of reading and observation.”

  Millar had a thick typescript of The Ivory Grin with him, and he read its final lines to Pearce: “ ‘I do feel grief for her. I loved her. There was nothing I wouldn’t do.’ He started down the veranda steps, his short black shadow dragging and jerking at his heels.” “And Ken said, ‘What that means, Don, is that the incomplete man in this culture is the broken shadow of the uncompleted woman.’ That’s what that scene was supposed to be saying! I don’t know how many readers would pick it up, but that’s what he was illustrating.” By way of dramatic emphasis, Millar with a sweep of his hand strewed his typescript all over the floor. “I jumped up to help him,” Pearce said, “thinking he had done it by accident. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Just part of the act!’ ”