Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  —Mystery Writers of America newsletter

  The audience in Angell Hall the first Wednesday of July 1953 stirred in anticipation of Ken Millar’s four-thirty lecture titled “The Scene of the Crime: Social Meanings of the Detective Story”—part of an ambitious summer symposium on the popular arts in America, whose other participants included W. C. Handy, cartoonist Milt Caniff, and film historian Kenneth MacGowan. Interest in Millar’s talk ran high, said Don Pearce: “He was a hot number right then, and there were three hundred and fifty people present, which absolutely filled that main auditorium.” The lecture was publicized on the front page of the campus paper (“Ace Writer of Mysteries Talks Today”) and would be broadcast later over an educational radio network to several states and parts of Canada.

  Millar was keyed up for the event. “I’ll do my damnedest to squeeze out some first-rate doctrine,” he promised organizer Richard Boys. His long paper was a serious exploration of the detective story from its roots in the Romantic tradition through its definition at the hands of Poe and Doyle to its present possibilities. “I’m a writer, not a speaker,” Millar warned. He would read straight from the page: no concessions to the audience, almost no eye contact. Such performances made Millar nervous all his life; by the end of this one, his white shirt and tan pants would be soaked with sweat. “The last occasion I had not so long ago to address a group in Angell Hall was my oral examination for the doctorate,” he began, “and I feel—to misquote Synge—that there isn’t anything more that Angell Hall can do to me.”

  He approached his topic with a few words on a Nobel Prize winner who once wrote scripts for Warner Bros. “William Faulkner is not usually thought of when mystery authors are mentioned,” Millar said, but Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust was “probably our most ambitious American mystery novel.” Millar wasn’t claiming this great novelist was just a detective writer but that “the mystery tradition is available for the purposes of the highest art.”

  The form originated, he said, in the nineteenth century’s freedom “to know evil as well as good,” and the tales of Poe (“our first completely aware nineteenth-century man”) expressed the urge to evil, “which modern man accepted as part of the bargain when he took entire command of his own will.” Poe invented the detective story, Millar thought, “in order to grasp and objectify the nature of the evil and somehow to place the guilt. That is probably the function of all good detective stories: to confront us imaginatively with evil, to explain it in the course of a narrative which convinces us of its reality, if possible to purge the evil.” Yet “the very best detective stories,” Millar said, “present a true vision of evil to which there is no rational counterstatement, and leave a residue of terror and understanding pity, as tragedy does, which can’t be explained away.” Among such works he included Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Hammett’s The Glass Key, Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, the “remarkable” The Leaden Bubble by H. C. Branson (in the audience today), and Vanish in an Instant—“written by a former Ann Arborite who shall be nameless” (Margaret Millar, of course).

  Among the “first-rate and tormented geniuses” who’d put crime fiction to its most serious use were Dostoyevsky and Dickens. The line continued to the present, with many modern writers choosing to undergo “the sharpest pains and bitterest moral dilemmas of our society,” voluntarily submitting themselves to “the involuntary anguish of the criminal, the insane, the dispossessed.” Unfortunately, Millar thought, the traditional detective story with its “brilliant” sleuth-hero (Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe) didn’t lend itself to such explorations. “It is the murderer rather than the detective who must be the center of attention,” he contended, “if the mystery is to have a genuine tragic interest.”

  He and other writers who didn’t choose to hold the problem of evil at arm’s length preferred “the so-called hard-boiled mystery,” he said (getting a laugh by admitting he’d prefer it be called something like “the American colorful mystery”). Millar caused an excited ripple by stating, “I don’t speak for the current truants from the school—the semiliterate unreconstructed Darwinian men, and the kindergarten Krafft-Ebings”—naming no names but obviously meaning Spillane and crew—“the less said about them the better.” No, Millar went on, “I speak for the respectable and quite serious literary tradition founded by Dashiell Hammett and less brilliantly I think by Raymond Chandler, but he should be mentioned too; he’s been very important as a master to me, in my way.” The difference between them and their apostates, Millar said, was “moral control, which expresses itself in stylistic control, as it doesn’t in the ones I object to.”

  Dashiell Hammett’s books, hidden by libraries thirty years ago due to racy content, were now being yanked from U.S. shelves abroad because of their author’s politics. Millar spent eleven minutes telling this Ann Arbor audience of Hammett’s literary aspects and virtues, focusing his remarks on The Maltese Falcon in what was probably the most serious critical analysis of that book since its publication. “This novel has astonishing imaginative energy after more than twenty years,” Millar claimed of the work he’d first read as a teenager in Kitchener. “I believe it can still express contemporary truth and comes close to tragedy, if there can be such a thing as deadpan tragedy.”

  Hammett’s hard-boiled road was one viable path to an understanding of modern reality, Millar said—a quest we needed to take to wean ourselves from the patronizing attitude of the Holmesian superinvestigator who looked at evil and commented complacently, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Staring his audience in the face for the first time, Millar concluded, “There is more humility and redemptive virtue in the contemporary hero-as-defendant, who says, ‘There go I, in spite of the grace of God.’ ”

  An instant of stunned silence was followed by a wave of heavy applause. It had been a powerful talk, nearly an hour in length, and Millar was proud of his performance. He paid ten dollars for a transcription disc of the lecture, which he’d take back to Santa Barbara and insist on playing for friends such as Hugh Kenner. “He was awfully pleased to have that on record,” said Donald Pearce, “especially that storm of applause at the end—which must have meant more to him than I would be willing to speculate in terms of righting the injustices of his academic connection with the University of Michigan.”

  In town without Margaret, Millar stayed on in Ann Arbor a few days. Perhaps he enjoyed the break from his Santa Barbara routine, some aspects of which struck Michigan friends as bizarre. “He told me,” said Pearce, “he and Margaret had a reputation in Santa Barbara for being fastidious about eating when they went to people’s homes, and everyone wondered how they managed to get along on the little bit they’d put on their plates. ‘The secret,’ he said, ‘is whenever we have an invitation to go anywhere, we always eat first at home.’ I thought, ‘What a grotesque and strange thing to do.’ He explained Margaret found eating with other people disgusting: to watch them chew and salivate and talk while munching, and be aware of the food being swallowed down the gullet and into the stomach—it was barbarous. She thought people should eat alone.” Her rationale masked an eating disorder that had begun in childhood. Millar went along with her, as he accommodated her reluctance to go out at night (ostensibly because she developed respiratory problems and headaches after dark).

  He and Maggie were getting along better than ever, he thought, and it was a matter of honor to him that he’d never strayed into affairs. “Ken was proud of the fact that when he was a navy officer, he was never unfaithful,” Hugh Kenner said, “which I gather was not always typical of navy officers. He was a strictly good and faithful husband and father.” But the marriage had its strains at the best of times (some of the best lines in their books came from their fights, the Millars told friends; in Margaret’s Do Evil in Return, for instance, a man named Lew says, “No, I haven’t been drinking, much. Just enough to keep me from strangling my wife”); and Millar did have tender feelings toward other women. During this Ann Arbor stay he went
to some lengths to express one such fondness.

  “He had a real affection for the wife of someone at Michigan,” said Pearce. “She and her husband invited Ken over one night and he asked if he could bring me along. Ken was in very good humor and obviously very happy to be there. He and I were talking quite spontaneously to each other, and this woman said, ‘Oh, when I see the immediate responsiveness that you two have in conversation, I really envy that’—almost like saying, ‘I wish I had something in my life like that’; it was like dropping a pretty strong hint of some sort. Anyway, this served to fan the evening a little bit. And Ken—he was really quite cunning in some ways—insisted I sing. I’m sure he wanted me to sing something like ‘The Man I Love,’ but I couldn’t think of anything except ‘Old Man River’! After a while the rest of them joined in, and that made the evening even looser and more pleasant. And then a question was asked of Ken as to how Margaret was, and he said, ‘You know, you’ve no idea how much pluck and strength she has; when she’s fond of somebody, she’ll risk anything for that person.’ ” Millar told of visiting their friend M. M. Musselman the previous year in a Santa Monica hospital before his death from pancreatic cancer. (“Mussey was my darling,” Maggie remembered. “We both really loved that man. He was in hideous pain. He had a blockage, and he was actually at the point where his feces were coming up through his throat.”) “And Ken said, ‘On leaving that evening, Margaret went over to him’—and here Ken raised his voice—‘and kissed him on the mouth!’ And he said, ‘That took a lot to do, and that’s the kind of person she is.’

  “Later as we were hanging around the door saying good-night, Ken made a little move toward this woman—and she and he had a nice kiss, on the mouth. And her husband in a kind of rough, austere sort of tone said, ‘Well, the only difference between me and Ken is that I’m staying the night.’ Anyway we left, and afterwards Ken explained the psychology of that evening to me, how he had planned it, and how I was to come along in order to provide some assistance and loosen things up. No kidding. He planned that he would kiss her openly and she would respond, and his way of doing it was to drop in the emphasized statement and kissed him on the mouth, almost like a pushbutton command. And he was proud of the way that had worked out; this had been a successful evening for Ken. Okay. Colorful guy.”

  He loved that woman, Millar explained in a letter to Branson, as he also loved Anna Branson and Mary Pearce and Hank and Don and other males and females: “But I don’t mean sexual love by all this, which is something you’ve never understood. With women even, it’s only the potentiality of sexual love. I’m strictly monogamous, and with the help of God and advancing age I’ll stay that way. Just so you won’t think I’m the wolf I sometimes appear to be. I enjoy people so much my enjoyment sometimes runs away with me, but never to the point I am talking about. Which may be why women are able and willing to show me affection, that I value above all else.”

  “There was a great deal of warmth in him,” said Pearce. “And he was grateful for small warmths, if they were genuine; he loved that. I can’t imagine a more lonely person down deep, really lonely. Looking for the person whom he could freely and without concentration be with, somebody who didn’t constantly keep him in a state of self-definition—in other words a real affection or friendly relationship. I don’t think he ever had it. And don’t think he didn’t long for it. He did.”

  * * *

  Millar’s aesthetic ideals might be as elevated as any Knopf author’s this side of Sartre (“I should like to see [the mystery’s] philosophic possibilities explored, as Pirandello developed the problem drama for philosophic purposes or Kafka the psychological novel for theological ends”), but his career took him where the market led. In 1953 it led into the pages of Manhunt, a digest-sized New York crime-fiction magazine. Here Millar’s work (and that of James M. Cain, David Goodis, William Irish, and Evan Hunter) appeared cheek by bloody jowl with Mickey Spillane’s, whose crude fantasies Millar and most of his MWA colleagues loathed. Manhunt aimed to combine the hard-boiled style of classic pulps like Black Mask with the commercial appeal of Spillane (“the largest-selling writer in the world today”). Its first issue included a Spillane story and sold a whopping half million copies; Millar was in that issue with “Shock Treatment,” a “Kenneth Millar” tale dashed off aboard the Shipley Bay. Manhunt’s second issue, in which Spillane also appeared, had Macdonald’s Lew Archer novelette “The Imaginary Blonde.” Millar/Macdonald published four stories in Manhunt in 1953, each (except “Shock Treatment”) about fifteen thousand words long and paying the author about seven hundred fifty dollars. As the Archer novels were influenced by movie technique, so these short stories seemed written with TV in mind; in fact “The Guilty Ones” was constructed for possible television adaptation. For a Macdonald author picture, Millar sent Manhunt a frontal X ray of his skull (taken with his nurse sister-in-law’s help), and the gag scored a big hit with Manhunt readers, he was told.

  The same picture was used on the jacket of Meet Me at the Morgue. That non-Archer book got good reviews, and though it didn’t do well in hardcover (“the present state of the fiction market . . . is unbelievably bad,” Knopf told Millar, “and nothing is really selling”), it was bought after all for reprint by Pocket Books; and the Mystery Guild paid two thousand dollars to do its own edition. Better yet, the book sold to Cosmopolitan. All this was encouraging and lucrative, but it did seem that for every career step forward there was some unforeseen price.

  Millar’s pleasure in the Cosmo sale for instance was mitigated by an unexpected complaint from John D. MacDonald, last heard from in 1949. MacDonald, now a prolific author of paperback “originals,” telegraphed his agent (who forwarded the wire to Millar): THROUGH HAROLD OBER IN 1949 I GAVE KENNETH MILIAR LIMITED APPROVAL TO USE JOHN MACDONALD PSEUDONYM MERELY BECAUSE HE HAD ALREADY CONTRACTED UNDER THAT NAME FOR LEW ARCHER SERIES. I HAVE THE CORRESPONDENCE. REGISTER STRONGEST POSSIBLE PROTEST OVER CURRENT COSMO NOVELETTE. I WANT IT STOPPED. MacDonald’s agent wrote von Auw that his client would seek an injunction to prevent Millar from using the Macdonald pseudonym on anything other than Archer stories.

  Millar responded to this “shocking surprise” with a long letter to von Auw:

  An “agreement” to which Mr. MacDonald refers, limiting my Macdonald publications to Archer novels, never, in fact, existed, as you know. . . . I have never made any agreement whatever with him. At this advanced stage in my career . . . I cannot possibly enter into an agreement to limit my production in accordance with his desires. The suggestion seems to me inordinate, and the statement that I “infringe on his identity,” the implication that a writer of my standing seeks or would seek to trade on his reputation, gratuitous and insulting. . . . What Mr. MacDonald demands would convert a minor annoyance to both of us into a major disaster to my career. . . . Mr. MacDonald writes as a man with a grievance. I do not understand how I have harmed him. . . . I had always supposed that there was room for all of us. When Mr. MacDonald . . . also emerged as a mystery novelist under the name MacDonald, it did not occur to me that his success could be a threat to mine. I have always taken pleasure in another writer’s success. But I cannot take pleasure in an attempt to use such success as a stick to beat me with.

  MacDonald thought this “objectionable” and “snotty” and wrote Millar to say so, in a letter Millar nonetheless claimed put things “on a friendlier footing.” In a five-page reply, he asked:

  Could you have mistaken a letter of explanation for an agreement? My point is that I don’t use the name J.R.M. with or by your permission. But before you get sore as hell again, let me hasten to add that I’m not trying to go legalistic and evasive on you. I seem to be in your hair, and I want to get out of your hair . . . . Look at my side of it for a moment. I’ve spent five years building the name J.R.M. into an important name in my field. . . . Perhaps my original choice of the name was stupid, though it didn’t seem so at the time. Certainly it was an unlucky choice. . . . The similarity of
my father’s name to yours was a damned unlucky coincidence, more unlucky for me than for you, as I think you’ll admit if you think about it. The most depressing aspect of the thing is that you seem to believe . . . that I am trading on the similarity of my pseudonym to your name—now that you have emerged as a big name—in order to sell fiction to your markets. To put it as quietly as possible, this is not the case. . . . Give me credit for honesty at least, and stick to the facts.

  Cosmo certainly hadn’t helped matters, he agreed, by misspelling his pseudonym as “MacDonald” (an already common error), but he assured MacDonald, “I am incapable of trying to trade on your reputation. I have a perfectly good reputation of my own to trade on.” He couldn’t afford to ditch the name and start all over, he said, but:

  What I can do—and this is not an agreement or a contract but a statement of intention . . . I can do my best to shift away from the name Macdonald wherever and whenever possible. That’s vague, I know. Writing’s a chancy business, and I can’t tie myself up with any hard and fast agreement. . . . On the other hand, if I go into paperback originals, as I may, I wouldn’t want to do it under the name Macdonald. . . . I’ve given the thing some days of anxious thought, and this seems to be the best I can come up with. . . . I hope this doesn’t strike you as another snotty letter. . . . I am going to do my damnedest to lean as far over in your direction as I can without falling flat on my face.

  Millar closed with some ambiguous praise: “Your letter caught me in the midst of reading The Neon Jungle”—MacDonald’s most recent paperback original—“and wondering how you write so much so well so fast.”

  MacDonald answered in mollifying fashion:

  I was not implying that you per se were trading on or attempting to trade on my ill gotten gains. Only implying that all publishers are, in essence, bastards, and if they could trade on the similarity of names at this point at your expense or mine, they would. . . . Look, don’t sweat it at this point. Writing is rough enough all over, and there are few enough of us living at it. (This is living?) I accept it from here as an accomplished thing, about which little can be done. About which maybe nothing should be done . . . maybe, God knows, we’re even helping each other. . . . Thank God, if this had to happen, at least it happened with somebody who can write. . . . If you want to chill your blood, sit down some time and ponder the fact that your father’s name might have been Michael Spillane MacDonald.