Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  This trouble was minor compared to what Millar faced in September. Alfred Knopf and others at the firm thought the new Archer novel, Find a Victim, was disappointingly weak; Mystery Guild declined the book; and Pocket Books said it wouldn’t reprint it. Millar had lost his paperback house. Given publishing economics, Knopf was unlikely to do the book in hardcover without being assured of a softcover sale. This was a potential disaster.

  Fortunately a solution was at hand. Bantam Books senior editor Saul David, a fan of Millar’s since reading Blue City in Esquire, had for three years been telling his friend Pat Knopf that Bantam should be Macdonald’s reprint house, saying Bantam could do much better by him than Pocket. In October 1953, Pat Knopf informed David that Macdonald would finally make the move. The Bantam people were delighted. There was one hitch, Alfred Knopf informed Millar: Bantam wanted reassurance that Millar meant to keep on writing mysteries. “I’m sure you can understand their point of view,” he wrote, “they don’t want to start with you unless they can look forward to a continuing, profitable association.” Knopf urged him to say yes: “It doesn’t seem to me at this stage that you can afford to give up Macdonald.” Millar was pleased (if puzzled) to state his intentions clearly: “I expect to write a mystery novel every year or so for the rest of my life. And I have twenty notebooks, believe it or not, filled with plots. . . . I don’t know where the idea arose that I was planning professional harikari.”

  Though Bantam seemed happy with Find a Victim and Knopf agreed to buy it, Alfred still didn’t like the manuscript (too talky, not dramatic enough) and instructed Millar to finish revisions already begun: “If we like them, we will show them to Bantam; if we don’t, we will stick, after all, to the original text.”

  Knopf’s dissatisfaction with Victim took Millar by surprise, since he’d kept Knopf’s advice about “action and general menace” in mind as he’d written the book (“parts of it as often as five times”). But he conceded its effects maybe got muffled when he tried to tone down the blood-and-guts parts in favor of character and psychology. “I leaned over backwards a bit in the face of the Spillane phenomenon, and will now lean forward again.” The book was too intricately constructed for him to do a major rewrite, he said, but he’d try to cut wordy passages, sharpen dramatic scenes, and bring out the suppressed sex and violence. “Believe me,” he assured Knopf, “I’m grateful for your interest and concern, in spite of the attendant pains of the situation. I believe this jolt—everyone needs an occasional jolt, damn it—will turn out to be beneficial in the long run. It strengthens my desire to become the world’s best mystery writer.” Millar outlined his plans for several sequences. Would Knopf oblige him by saying where and how the story seemed inadequate?

  Knopf would not. “We’re in a somewhat awkward three-cornered situation now,” he maintained. “We have a book which we don’t like too well, but which we are willing to publish. Bantam is willing to publish it. You see ways of improving it.” Given these complexities, Knopf said, “I somehow feel I ought not to put in my oar.” Instead he passed Millar’s proposals to Saul David. Let David and Millar hash it out.

  The Bantam editor thought Millar’s ideas were fine, but he asked that the author add one more scene: “We’d like to see Kerrigan beaten up before he’s killed. . . . We’re agreed that the reader feels an aching need to lay hands on this guy.” Millar, who’d in the past rejected such suggestions from Knopf and Pocket Books, could hardly refuse his new softcover savior. Bantam, a younger house with a leaner roster, seemed thrilled to have Macdonald joining its ranks; David spoke with unabashed enthusiasm: “I’d like to say how pleased we are here at becoming your reprinter . . . extremely pleased . . . because—among other reasons—we get to read your books quicker this way.” How different this was from the mood at Pocket, where they had their pick of established stars and had acted as if they were doing Macdonald a favor. As “a crowning stupidity” (which Millar resented “like hell” but could do nothing about), Pocket announced that their reprint of The Ivory Grin would be called Marked for Murder.

  Millar was glad to get away from Pocket Books, where he’d always been in Chandler’s shadow. Having Chandler and Macdonald at the same reprint house was nearly as bad as if Chandler and Macdonald had both been at Knopf. Interestingly, Alfred Knopf wrote Raymond Chandler this year and asked if he was on strike against publishing methods (Chandler, now with Houghton Mifflin, hadn’t done a novel since 1949). Perhaps Knopf was sick of the hypersensitive Millar, with his anemic sales and his paperback snafus, and hoped to lure Chandler back to Borzoi. Chandler admitted to Knopf that “in a way I regret that I was ever persuaded to leave you. . . . But I did, and a man can’t keep jumping about from publisher to publisher. Anyhow, you have your hard-boiled writer now, and for a house of your standing one is enough.” (Was Chandler hinting that if Knopf were to drop Macdonald though . . . ?)

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  Through October, November, and December, Millar revised Find a Victim, trying to please both of his publishers in hopes of better sales all round. He tired of the effort and was getting a bit sick of Lew Archer, he told Hank Branson: “I’d like to ditch that character, at least temporarily . . . but he seems to be my bread-and-butter, and I can’t afford to be bored with that.” The poor showing of the Archerless Meet Me at the Morgue confirmed Millar’s need to stick with his private eye.

  In December, Knopf had new cause to find fault with his lone hard-boiled author. The year-end Wilson Library Bulletin included a biography (with photograph) of Kenneth Millar that revealed his identity as John Ross Macdonald. Millar had agreed to the disclosure (the piece wouldn’t have been printed if he hadn’t) and supplied the disingenuous information he’d taken a pen name “partly because there were so many Kenneth and Margaret Millar titles on the market.” The Macdonald “secret” had been told before (in the MWA newsletter, and on the broadcast of his Michigan talk), but the Wilson article (reprinted in Current Biography) shouted it. A querulous Knopf wrote von Auw, “I don’t suppose any harm has been done, but I do wish he had told me whenever he made up his mind that he didn’t care who knew that Millar and Macdonald were one and the same.” Now they’d have to figure out how to deal with it on the jacket of the new Archer book.

  If there ever was a new book. Millar sent the second half of the revised Victim to New York the day after New Year’s, 1954, telling Knopf he felt the text was much better now, literarily and commercially: “I wouldn’t have redone the book if you had liked it in the first place, but now I’m glad I did. As I wrote to Saul David . . . I’m willing to do whatever I can to secure for my talent the audience we all feel it deserves.” Knopf agreed the book was in good shape, but he wasn’t done with demands. He wanted Millar to take out or tone down several semi-explicit sex references in the new pages: “I think this sort of thing should not appear in books of this kind. They do no particular good and they do offend a great many of the kind of readers on whom you and we have to count.” Millar seemed to be getting mixed signals from the old man: prodded by paperback houses, Knopf suggested Millar spice up Archer; faced with what he found to be overly frank prose, Knopf drew back. A tired Millar said he’d make the requested deletions: “I’ve no wish to offend anyone of course, and actually prefer the pages as altered.”

  All this second- and third-guessing and re-rewriting was getting him down. He tried to look on the bright side: Bantam would pay better money than Pocket Books, and foreign sales were good. Cassell in England and Les Presses de la Cité in France sold more hardcover Archers overseas than Knopf did in the United States (though Millar hardly wanted that publicized). Also heartening was a review in the London Times Literary Supplement (unsigned, but written by Julian Symons) that said, “Mr. John Ross Macdonald must be ranked high among American thriller writers. His evocations of scenes and people are as sharp as those of Mr. Raymond Chandler. . . . Mr. Macdonald’s unusual merit is the ability to make an implicit social comment on the world he describes. The Ivory Grin uses m
any of the thriller’s standard ingredients, but it is not at all a standard product.” Millar was encouraged at being favorably compared with Chandler in the most important book paper in England, a country where Chandler was considered a serious novelist. Millar for one felt no one charged the hard-boiled form with more life and meaning than he himself. If only he could get book buyers to see that—not to mention the capricious Alfred A. Knopf.

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  REASONABLE FACSIMILE

  . . . With Dashiell Hammett no longer producing and Raymond Chandler showing signs of weariness, Macdonald is just the man for fans who like those original brands.

  —Time, July 1954

  ANNUAL EVENT

  As of now, John Ross Macdonald (the alias of Kenneth Millar) is the best hardboiled mystery writer cooking. His yearly novels are a sort of Churchilliana among the knife-and-knucks memoirists.

  —Newsweek, September 1954

  In search of material for the next Archer, Millar spent the first weeks of 1954 in the company of psychiatric social worker Stanley Tenney, visiting juvenile halls and state hospitals (including Camarillo) up and down the coast. Millar also attended Civil Service Commission hearings on the firing of a veteran detective accused of paying informers with narcotics; the cop’s friends insisted he was framed by a local sheriff.

  What affected Millar most in all his research were the damaged young people: kids who strayed into theft or drugs and got in over their heads. He often saw himself in such youngsters and recalled some fates he’d barely escaped. “Most people don’t know what it is they’ve been saved from,” said Don Pearce. “He did. And he spent his life understanding it, and reliving it in a way in his books.”

  While Millar made field trips to see victims of bad luck and poor choices, his own teenaged daughter was headed for trouble. Linda had done well the past year at her private prep school; coached by good teachers, she’d come into her own as an excellent student. But she still couldn’t adjust socially and saw herself as an ugly duckling. Her parents tried to encourage a compensating superiority—she was smarter than the other kids, better than they were—but that didn’t help much. Gripped by “the A fever,” Linda used studies as a substitute for friends. The Millars were glad when she started earning pocket money baby-sitting for the Kenners and the Seeds; it seemed to make her feel better about herself.

  “Linda was an interesting girl,” Hugh Kenner recalled, “a little shy, a little strange, a little aloof. There was a stubborn, rebellious streak in that girl. Something happens when you’re an only child and you’re brought up by two parents who are always working.” In Kenner’s opinion, “Something unbalanced in Margaret I think got accentuated in Linda—really accentuated—and she just went over the edge.”

  Some of the Millars’ friends were disturbed by Linda’s precociousness. One woman complained that Linda brought “very bad reading material” (Studs Lonigan) to her home and discussed contraceptives and other sex matters with her children. Margaret brushed such criticisms aside; the Millars wouldn’t ever stifle Linda’s intellectual curiosity.

  But Linda craved more than mental stimulation. “I think she was mainly interested in experiencing life in the raw, that’s the impression I got,” said Geoff Aggeler, a Laguna Blanca classmate. “She was an extremely, extremely, extremely bright girl; she’d read a helluva lot. But she wanted excitement. She kind of intimidated me a bit.” Aggeler, later a professor at the University of Utah, was drawn to Linda partly because neither was popular at prep school. “Most of the kids who went there were little richies from Hope Ranch and Montecito,” he said, “kids who spent their weekends at places like the Coral Casino, the Biltmore Hotel. We weren’t part of that in group. She and I were sort of rivals as English types in the school. She was extremely gifted. Had her parents’ brains, obviously; they were, you know, these brilliant people. But I guess she got a little bit on the wild side. One of the first times I ever got drunk actually was over at her house when I was about thirteen.”

  The Millars didn’t know of her drinking, Aggeler said. “I dunno what that girl’s problem was, but it certainly wasn’t a lack of concern on the part of her parents. They seem to have been devoted to her. I remember seeing them on Sundays out riding bicycles together: Ken and Margaret Millar, Linda and another girl. I can remember going to a party with other kids our age at a neighbor’s house, and Ken driving us all home. He was an absolutely devoted father. It really impressed me. He did the best he could; in retrospect I can see he really must have had his hands full. I guess Linda was a little bit unstable.”

  Linda was terrified at the prospect of going to public high school in the fall of 1954. All the right kids would hate her, she knew, and she’d be stuck with the misfits. Millar told her high school was a necessary evil, that things would be better in college; she’d come into her own there, as he had. To get Linda to college sooner, the Millars devised an accelerated study plan in which she’d do three years of high school in two.

  Millar blamed some of his daughter’s problems on the vacuous California culture. He too felt disconnected here, despite his civic and social activities, which included an every-other-Wednesday lunch with other Santa Barbara writers (Paul Ellerbe, Willard Temple, John Mersereau, Al Stump, city librarian John Smith) that Millar had helped establish. Millar blamed Hollywood and the fake dreams it pandered for a lot of the displaced values, or lack of values, in this empty paradise. When he wrote the next Archer story, it drew as much on his disgust with Hollywood as it did all of his dogged research.

  Millar refreshed his impressions of the studio world by helping Maggie make good on her vow to buy a new car. H. N. Swanson got Margaret together with producers at Revue (the TV arm of MCA), with her husband as part of the package. The Millars went south and into the San Fernando Valley for story meetings at Republic Studios with the makers of City Detective, a syndicated police series starring Rod Cameron (of whom TV Guide said, “Most of his acting ability is in his fists”). They pitched ideas sifted from Millar’s notebooks and drew assignments for two scripts. One involved a man hiding from the aftermath of a hit-run accident that killed a teenaged girl; Margaret wrote the half-hour teleplay (alternately titled “Blind Justice” and “Blindman’s Buff”), and the Millars got a joint payment of seven hundred dollars. They earned another seven hundred with a story and script called “Like a Fox.” Margaret got sole credit (and the seven-hundred-dollar payment) for “Black Pearl,” a thirty-minute anthology episode for Revue. After more story sales by Maggie to The Web and Kraft Television Theatre, the Millars had enough for their car: a three-thousand-dollar eight-cylinder, black Ford. She picked the color, he the make and model: a limited-edition convertible with extra-heavy undercarriage. Millar took “laconic but very visible pride” in the new Ford, Pearce said: “He was proud that it was stronger and more powerful and much safer than any other convertible. Ken was a very cautious man. He did not take risks.” After Linda’s fifteenth birthday, in June 1954, Millar started teaching her to drive: a significant test of tolerance for both, given their mutual tempers.

  This same summer, as Millar worked his way into a new Lew Archer manuscript, the fifth Archer novel was published. Despite Millar’s rewrites, Find a Victim found no friends at Knopf. “As far as the future is concerned,” one editor there wrote of Millar, “I do think that it should be suggested to him that his characters are getting more and more sordid and twisted and that he might advantageously let up on them a bit.” After von Auw sent Knopf a soft-soaping note about Find a Victim (“probably the handsomest and smartest all round production job I have ever seen in a novel of this category . . . a model of good taste and fine designing”), the agent received a sharp-seeming response: “My best thanks. Now, if you will only send up this way a manuscript that will be fully worthy of not only our best efforts in design and production, but in promotion and selling, we’ll all be glad.” The firm “promoted” this novel with a tiny thre
e-and-a-half-inch “walking footprints” ad in the New York Times that made Find a Victim look like the most frivolous whodunit of the year. Knopf’s sales force placed orders for a mere twenty-seven hundred copies.

  For the first time in many seasons, some of the country’s top mystery reviewers were moved to utter a discouraging word about a Millar book: “Falls somewhat below his best work,” ventured Lenore Glen Offord in the San Francisco Chronicle. Kirkus Reviews was more blunt: “A long haul here.” Find a Victim was a hard book to like. Set around a small northern California town, it began in exciting fashion, with Archer finding a dying man by the side of a highway and being drawn into a scenario involving hijacked trucks, embezzled cash, and several murders. But as Millar later acknowledged, great starts can lead to muddled middles. Victim bogged down in scenes of domestic unpleasantness that seemed to belong in someone else’s bad play. Little sunlight brightened a plot filled with adultery, drug-taking, and incest.

  Paradoxically, the problematic Find a Victim brought Millar more national attention than any previous book. Apparently spurred by the dust-cover revelation that John Ross Macdonald was really Ken Millar, the country’s leading newsweeklies both ran favorable reviews of Victim, the first time Millar or Macdonald had been noticed by Time or Newsweek; Time also printed a photo of Millar, pipe in gout-swollen hand. Both magazines echoed the Boucher line on Macdonald as heir apparent to Hammett and Chandler. Boucher himself didn’t fail to come through for this book, calling it “the best yet of the novels about. . . Lew Archer—which means that it is about as good as the hardboiled detective story can get.” Millar, in an effusive letter of thanks, told Boucher the review brought tears to his eyes: “I had difficulties with publishers over the book which it would be tedious and painful to describe. . . . Your opinion makes me feel, know, that I’m not off in the wilderness by myself.”