by Tom Nolan
The book he began in 1952 was a further step removed: it had as its hero-narrator not Lew Archer but a young county probation officer called Howard Cross. This was meant as the first “Kenneth Millar” novel the author and Knopf thought would alternate with the Archer books. Millar made friends with people in the Santa Barbara probation office, who vetted his manuscript for authenticity. The story (a variation on Millar’s fatal-hit-and-run theme) involved analysis of car paint and headlight evidence. To get these details right, Millar called on the leading expert in such matters: LA forensic chemist Ray Pinker, the “test-tube detective” famous from his portrayal on the radio and television police drama Dragnet.
Jack Webb’s Dragnet was one of many shows the Millars watched regularly in 1952 on a TV bought in February for four hundred thirty dollars. The writers’ viewing was partly research: Maggie told Ken she intended to earn enough money writing television scripts to buy a new car. “He wasn’t keen on my doing it,” she said, “but he went along with it, of course.”
Millar’s own writing was stopped in early ’52 by painful gout attacks that froze his right elbow and swelled his hands and feet. He was confined to a rented wheelchair for weeks. Here (to his mind) was another ailment triggered by an anxious psyche, a somatic attempt perhaps to soften a too rigid personality. Dependent on Margaret for weeks and months at a time, he came to value her help and friendship more than ever.
Except for the gout, Millar was happier in the spring of ’52 than he’d been in a long time. When a team from the Santa Barbara News-Press came in March to do a flattering story about these accomplished Cliff Drive dwellers, the Millars looked the picture of southern California success: Kenneth grinning bashfully like the cat that swallowed the Ph.D., his two women beaming at him with something close to adoration, the three of them seated in front of shelves filled with books written by husband and wife. “To many Santa Barbarans,” wrote reporter Verne Linderman, “Margaret and Kenneth Millar might be regarded as the town’s most enviable couple.”
The third Millar wasn’t having such an enviable time, though. Nearly thirteen, Linda was ill at ease in junior high, where the lessons were dull and where rowdy kids ruled the roost. At home she felt cowed by her parents’ IQs and achievements. She’d given up piano, as she’d given up art. Though she said she planned on medical school, her fondest wish was to grow up and have children. Millar wrote Branson, “It’s a long wait between puberty and adulthood in this society, and Algebra, French and swimming don’t quite fill the gap.”
In her insecurity Linda was prey to bad influences; an older girl taught her to smoke. More worrisome were the young hoods among her classmates. Two boys with police records followed her and a girlfriend home one day, bent on sex. Millar sent the punks packing as swiftly as he’d dealt with troublemakers when he was a Kitchener high school teacher, but this was the last straw. He wouldn’t have his daughter menaced. He and Margaret would take Linda out of public school at the end of term and enroll her in Laguna Blanca, an excellent private prep school. It would be expensive, but their peace of mind (and Linda’s safety) would be worth it.
As almost always, the Millars needed cash (they’d make about eleven thousand dollars in 1952, with him bringing in nine thousand of it). Millar’s television-watching gave him ideas. He talked up the notion of a thirteen-week Lew Archer TV series with H. N. Swanson (working title: The Moving Target). As the basis for a possible leadoff episode, Millar wrote an Archer short story (“The Guilty Ones”) structured like a TV play, and he cooked up plots for another dozen Target episodes. Millar reminded Swannie there’d be a strong new Archer novel (The Ivory Grin) out soon: “If it makes the splash I expect it to, it should help to sell an Archer television series.” Millar’s non-Archer novel in progress also presented a good TV prospect, he told Swannie: “It seems to me a probation officer, with the freedom of a private eye, and the reality and responsibility of a Dragnet cop, would make a great character to string crime dramas on. In what form should that idea be presented for sale? One audition play and summaries of the rest? Please let me know what you think of it. I have a number of ideas for it, and have been offered access to official files in which there are plenty more.”
The probation officer book was sent to New York in late July, and Alfred Knopf told Millar, “I like it immensely. I think it is one of your best.” Millar thought he might do more books with this Howard Cross hero. He and Knopf agreed that since the new book was no great departure in style from the Archer novels and since the publisher had worked hard to build the Macdonald name (with some success: The Ivory Grin went into a second printing), they might as well bring out this book as by “John Ross Macdonald” and not “Kenneth Millar.”
The agents sold the Cross book to Cosmopolitan magazine for condensation: a nice $5,000 surprise. All was well on the publishing front until August, when Knopf passed on disquieting comments from Pocket Books: the paperback house had strong misgivings about this new non-Archer.
Knopf quoted the Pocket Books honcho: “Reading the manuscript left me once again puzzled about the author and his works. He is a very good writer and a fairly capable plotter, but for some reason all the books lack the kind of punch which should go with the sort of story he writes. Maybe the author is just too nice a person, but his bad characters somehow or other aren’t believably bad. The sharp contrast between good and evil, so noticeable in Chandler’s books and so important to this kind of story, is simply missing, at least for me. I wonder if some one of your [Knopf’s] experts couldn’t somehow sharpen both the characters and the action.”
Millar was offended and angered by the suggestion that a Knopf editor rewrite his work to make it more like Chandler’s. He wrote Knopf a five-page letter that was part defense, part attack, and part statement of artistic principles:
Do you think the book needs rewriting? It’s already had a lot. While I’m perfectly willing to rewrite places where the action drags or characters fade out—just show me the places—and to concede that any of my books is improvable, I think that perhaps a main difficulty arises from Pocket Books’ assumption that this is a hardboiled novel, which it is not, and more specifically that this is an imitation of Chandler which fails for some reason to come off. I must confess I was pleased with the characterization—the characters are more human than in anything I’ve done, closer to life—and more than pleased with the plot. Plot is important to me. I try to make my plots carry meaning, and this meaning such as it is determines and controls the movement of the story. I know I have a tendency to subordinate individual scenes to the overall intention, to make the book the unit of effect. Perhaps this needs some correction, without going to the opposite extreme. This opposite extreme is represented by Chandler, one of my masters with whose theory and practice I am in growing disagreement. For him any old plot will do—most of his plots depend on the tired and essentially meaningless device of blackmail—and he has stated that a good plot is one that makes for good scenes. So far from taking him as the last word and model in my field, which Pocket Books thinks I should do, it would seem—I am interested in doing things in the mystery which Chandler didn’t do, and probably couldn’t.
His subject is the evilness of evil, his most characteristic achievement the short vivid scene of conflict between (conventional) evil and (what he takes to be) good. With all due respect for the power of these scenes and the remarkable intensity of his vision, I can’t accept Chandler’s vision of good and evil. It is conventional to the point of occasional old-maidishness, anti-human to the point of frequent sadism (Chandler hates all women and most men, reserving only lovable oldsters, boys and Marlowe for his affection), and the mind behind it, for all its enviable imaginative force, is uncultivated and second-rate. At least it strikes my mind that way. I owe a lot to Chandler (and more to Hammett), but it would be simple self-stultification for me to take him as the last word in the mystery. My literary range greatly exceeds his, and my approach to writing will not wear out so fast.<
br />
My subject is something like this: human error, and the ambivalence of motive. My interest is the exploration of lives. If my stories lack a powerful contrast between good and evil, as Pocket Books points out, it isn’t mere inadvertence. I don’t see things that way, and haven’t since Blue City. Even in Blue City, you may recall, the victim of the murder and the father of the “hero” was also the source of corruption in the city. Because my theme is exploration, I employ a more open and I think subtler set of values than is usual; its background is sociological and psychological rather than theological. I chose the hardboiled convention in the first place because it seemed to offer both a market, and a structure with which almost anything could be done, a technique both difficult and free, adapted to my subject matter, and a field in which I might hope to combine the “popular” and the “sensitive” hero, and forge a style combining flexibility, literacy and depth with the solidity and eloquence of the American-colorful-colloquial. These have been my literary aims; my hope is to write “popular” novels which will not be inferior to “serious” novels. I have barely started.
In spite of the Spillane phenomenon which has nothing much to do with the mystery but which probably has unsettled paperback publishers’ notions of what a mystery is, I think the future of the mystery is in the hands of a few good writers like myself. The old-line hardboiled novel with its many guns and fornications and fisticuffs has been ruined by its practitioners, including the later Chandler. Spillane pulled the plug. I have no intention of plunging after it down the drain. My new book, though it is an offspring or variant of the hardboiled form, is a stage in my emergence from that form and a conscious step towards the popular novel I envisage. That very tone to which Pocket Books objects, and which I have tried to make literate without being forbidding, human without being smeary, and let us face it adult, is what distinguishes it from the run-of-the-gin-mill mystery. It isn’t as if I were out on a limb by myself. The critics and my colleagues know what I am doing. Some of my fellow mystery-writers, and they are the real experts, think that my last two books are the best that have ever been done in the tradition that Hammett started. While I don’t think myself that I possess Hammett’s genius—and that’s a hard thing for me to admit—I do think the talent I have is flexible and durable. My rather disproportionate (for a fiction writer) training in literary history and criticism which tended to make me a slow and diffident starter also operates to keep me going and I think improving. I do know I can write a sample of the ordinary hard-boiled mystery with my eyes closed. But preferring as I do to keep my eyes open, I’ve spent several years developing it into a form of my own, which nobody can imitate. When the tough school dies its inevitable death I expect to be going strong, twenty or thirty books from now. As I see it, my hope of real success as a writer, both artistic and commercial, resides in developing my own point of view and narrative approach to the limit. If I overvalue my point of view and the work I do from it, that is the defect of the virtue of believing in what I am doing. I believe in the present book, though it’s not by any means as good a book as I am sure I can write.
Knopf certainly hadn’t meant to prompt such a long and impassioned document. The publisher assured Millar, “I am all for the writer who wants to go his own way. . . . So I say more power to your pen and typewriter!” But they did need a new title for the probation officer book, Knopf insisted. Millar called it Message from Hell, which Knopf nixed. Pocket Books (who bought the book without revisions) wanted The Convenient Corpse, which Millar couldn’t abide. The author halfheartedly countered with Meet Me at the Morgue, which Knopf seized on: “And good luck to all of us.”
If Knopf hadn’t known how seriously Millar took his writing, he certainly knew now. Millar brought the same sense of purpose to the civic sphere this presidential election season. He and Margaret were both energized by Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson. As Millar’s gout receded under cortisone treatment (he was on crutches by August, walking unaided by October), he participated fully in Stevenson’s Santa Barbara campaign: doing two weeks of precinct work, penning a speech for Woodrow Wilson’s daughter, and writing a hard-hitting radio response to Senator Joe McCarthy’s Stevenson attack.
Most but not all of Ken’s and Maggie’s friends were Democrats. Millar accommodated himself to Republican chums (though bad feelings over this election wrecked the Millars’ relationship with a couple they’d each dedicated books to). One good Republican friend was Harris Seed, a young lawyer who met the Millars when he and his wife rented the Bath Street house. Harris and Nancy Seed spent occasional evenings at the Millar house on Cliff Drive, drinking beer and playing Scrabble. (As Seed recalled, Margaret memorized the dictionary’s X and Z words.) He and Millar valued frank discussions of legal and social matters, said Seed: “We talked about all the current issues of the time: the death penalty, things of that character. We didn’t feel the need to hide our emotions, we had at it. Who better than a brilliant antagonist to argue with? Not much fun talking to a dummy.”
The politically conservative Hugh Kenner (later good friends with William F. Buckley Jr.) ducked discussion of U.S. electoral matters by invoking his Canadian citizenship. Millar was more interested in talking literature with Kenner anyhow. Maggie was the one for whom Kenner was a trial. “Margaret and I always had a very guarded relationship,” Kenner said. “She was intensely antiacademic, and I think she suspected that I had a bad influence on Ken by dragging him in that direction.” You could see Margaret’s dislike of Kenner in her body language, said Don Pearce, whom Kenner looked up in Michigan at Millar’s urging: “She would roll her cigarette holder, as if she were getting ready to throw a remark like a javelin. But he never gave her a chance, he always would talk on in a way that was impregnable because it was backed up with information that she didn’t have. He’d discovered how to do that after being made uncomfortable by her for quite a while.” “My God that guy has crust,” Maggie groused to Millar of Kenner. “Only two people inhabit his strange world, himself and his alter ego, the kid.”
The Millars invited all their friends to a post-Halloween costume party the Saturday night before the election. Taking a leaf from Ned Guymon, Margaret insisted they all come as book titles. Al Stump’s wife, Claire, said, “I flunked sewing, so I put a brain on a plate and that was Peace of Mind. I remember when I arrived, Harris Seed was out front hiding behind a bush, feeling like a fool in his costume, and Nancy was kind of flailing him on into the house; I think he was The Rains Came.” Kenner wrote Pearce in advance: “M. J. [Mary Jo], who is seven months pregnant, is going to be The Man Within without benefit of costume; I’m going to pin a watch to my lapel along with a drawing of two holes in the ground (wells) and be The Time Machine. I like doing these things simply, if only to annoy Maggie.”
The Millars threw another party for Democrats only the night of Tuesday, November 4, to view the election returns on TV. Dwight Eisenhower’s crushing defeat of Stevenson took Ken and Maggie completely by surprise. Two days later, Millar wrote an emotional letter of support to the defeated candidate: “We saw a civilization taking shape at last here under your hand, an age of Stevenson. Your speeches made politics real to us for the first time, and your integrity promised to hold back the slipping reality of life itself. . . . If a majority of our people turned their backs on you and the future, they did it out of simple childishness and fear. Which only proves that we need you more than I thought. . . . Like many others in the last few months I have come to love you, you will excuse the word: no weaker one will do.”
Millar didn’t do things by half. His commitments—to a wife, a candidate, a genre—were total. He brought the idealism of his politics to the writing of detective stories. Millar told Michigan professor Dick Boys, “I see the mystery in all its varying degrees of contemporary consciousness as a symbolic attempt to grapple with the American fear of death, for which our culture makes such meager provision, and to fit it into life.” It was one of his aims, he said, to purge the C
handler-Hammett hero of his current aggressions, “fed raw to us by such practitioners as Spillane the poet laureate of sexual psychopathy,” and restore him “to a practical relation with ethics and the community.” To his old professor Thorpe, Millar wrote he wanted “to impart first-class standards into the standardless mass of popular culture, somewhat along lines laid down by Poe and [Robert Louis] Stevenson and Graham Greene.” Family, politics, a decent home, the ocean: these all gave Millar’s life meaning and pleasure, but it was work that brought real satisfaction. Now, Millar told Thorpe, after twelve books in nine years, “I think I know where I’m going and will find ways to take my readers with me.”
* * *
* * *
* * *
U.S. REMOVES LIBRARY BOOKS
NEW YORK—(AP)—Several hundred books by more than 40 authors have been removed from United States libraries overseas, a world-wide survey by the New York Times reported yesterday.
Removal of the books was said to have been based on six confidential directives from the State Department since last Feb. 19. . . .
Among the better-known authors, whose books were removed in at least some libraries, these were listed:
Lillian Hellman, Clarence K. Streit, Langston Hughes, Walter Duranty, Dashiell Hammett, Howard Fast and Edgar Snow.
—June 1953
In response to numerous inquiries, THE THIRD DEGREE points out that Veteran Detective Author Dashiell Hammett, recently jailed in New York on contempt charges growing out of his refusal to divulge the source of bail bonds furnished to indicted Communist leaders, has never been a member of MWA.