Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Raymond Chandler had a new book out this quarter too: The Long Goodbye, the first Philip Marlowe novel in five years and, many thought, the best ever. Boucher praised Goodbye as “probably the definitive” private eye novel and (unlike Chandler’s The Little Sister) included it in his New York Times best-of-the-year list. But on that same list, not at all eclipsed by Chandler’s effort, was John Ross Macdonald’s Find a Victim.

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  Another sort of book demanded Millar’s quick attention in the summer of 1954. Bantam, demonstrating its pleasure at signing Macdonald (“Bantam at least seems solidly behind me,” Millar wrote Boucher, now that Knopf seemed lukewarm), made a deal for a collection of Lew Archer short stories. The paperback would combine the five Archer novelettes done for Manhunt and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine with two Millar stories written with other protagonists (“Find the Woman”’s Joe Rogers, “The Bearded Lady” ’s Sam Drake) who’d both become Archer in this book. Saul David said Bantam’s salespeople were “vastly enthusastic about the prospect.” The firm wanted to print the collection immediately so it could be on newsstands in time for Bantam’s edition of Find a Victim in early 1955.

  Though Bantam didn’t request revisions, Millar wanted to rewrite the stories a little before committing them to a book, even a paperback. He took out violent bits that now seemed too Spillane-like, but in place of a romantic subplot in “The Bearded Lady” (whose sale to the American had so depressed him) Millar inserted a fight scene.

  He mailed the book to Bantam in late August. Saul David pronounced the revised stories “grand,” and from Millar’s list of proposed titles he chose The Name Is Archer. Bantam billed this collection “the case-book of a tough private eye” and wrapped it in a dramatic cover with a charcoal sketch of an ashen-faced Lew Archer holding a revolver at the ready.

  A lot of readers discovered Macdonald through this attention-grabbing “paperback original.” The book had a profound effect on at least one of them: Joe Gores. “One of the great turning points in my life was The Name Is Archer,” Gores recalled. “I was a student at Stanford when I read that, and I just went out of my fucking skull. Here was this vital kind of writing—something that had a beginning, a middle, and an end and wasn’t about some ponytailed graduate student who was gonna kill herself because she got a D. Here were stories that were about something: that gray-faced man on the cover, with the big gun. I devoured anything I could get by Macdonald.” Inspired by his reading, Gores became a private investigator in 1955; two years later he sold a short story to Manhunt and began a successful career as a crime-fiction writer.

  The Name Is Archer, conceived by Saul David as a way to earn a few dollars for Millar (and for his paperback house), would have sixteen Bantam printings in the next thirty-two years and be recognized as a classic in its field. Bill Pronzini, first president of the Private Eye Writers of America, in 1986 ranked Macdonald’s anthology “with Hammett’s Continental Op collections and Chandler’s Simple Art of Murder as the finest volumes of so-called hard-boiled crime stories.” Critic Douglas G. Greene went further, putting The Name Is Archer on his 1993 list of the Fifteen Greatest Detective Short Story Volumes Since Poe.

  After sending The Name Is Archer to New York, Millar went into the hospital for an operation to remove a thyroid tumor: another manifestation, he believed, of psychological stress. The tumor was benign, and Millar surprised the doctors and his wife by driving himself home two days after surgery. Maybe the “softening-up process” such ailments induced had a positive side. Certainly he and Maggie got along better these days. After sixteen years, Millar wrote the Bransons, he and Margaret had reached “the joint conclusion—believe it or not—that we’ve come into some kind of maturity in our marriage. Haven’t had a fight for months, just plain seem to enjoy each other’s company.”

  Millar could still give his wife literary assistance. In 1954, Margaret was well into the writing of a contemporary tale of a mentally ill woman, inspired in part by the Beauchamps case (the first recorded instance of schizophrenia in the United States), when the CBS-TV series Studio One aired a Gore Vidal play based on the same subject. The story was so similar and the show so well done that Margaret wanted to junk her manuscript. But Millar came up with a twist that saved his wife’s plot. Margaret finished her book, Beast in View, which became her best-known work.

  It was not without cost. Margaret so identified with her disturbed character, she wrote, that she shared her nightmare: “Every sound was a threat. . . . The telephone no longer rang, it shrilled. People didn’t talk, they screamed. A dog’s bark would make me jump out of my chair.” Doing the book “nearly killed” Maggie, Millar told friends. It took four months, she said, for her to recover.

  As his wife explored her worst imaginings for Beast in View, Millar was “drowning himself” in an Archer manuscript that also dealt powerfully with mental illness and violence. Both these writers specialized in turning trauma into fiction; they’d made careers out of wrestling their demons. Soon they’d be pitched into real-life nightmare by the one Millar family member who was unable to escape into art.

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  We had to pioneer a novel land

  And track the darkling wood behind the eyes.

  But who was Psyche? who analysand?

  Who is the hero of our mysteries?

  —from “To M.,” Kenneth Millar

  Later he’d call it the biggest mistake of his life, but at the time it seemed to make perfect sense. On March 21, 1955, at a Ford dealership on North Ann Arbor Street in Saline, Michigan, Ken Millar bought a used six-cylinder, 1953, light-green Ford Tudor sedan for $1,175, as a present for his daughter, who’d be sixteen in June.

  It was a reward for good grades. Her parents felt Linda deserved a morale booster. High school had turned out as bad as she’d feared. Being good-looking and popular was what counted the most there, and the peers who made the rules thought Linda was neither. The school counselor said she looked “dumpy.” Classmates tagged her “Brains.” Linda couldn’t play their social game.

  Millar was sickened and angered by what went on at his daughter’s school, “a place where our cultural conflicts are worked out, often at the expense of human souls. . . . Between the sheep and the goats, the squares and the rowdies, there seems no middle ground.” The lack of options turned Linda “boy crazy,” he felt; and her choice of males was poor. “Where boys were concerned,” he admitted, “she never learned much.” Some “pretty odd specimens” showed up at the Millar house, several of whom her parents banned, “literally for the girl’s safety.” When Linda admitted that one good-looking fellow had given her alcohol (she swore it was the first she’d had, and her father believed her), the Millars not only forbade her to see him again but took care to instruct her thoroughly on the dangers of drinking.

  Alcohol was a sore subject. Millar felt he and Margaret set their daughter a poor example. Maggie still enjoyed her Miller High Life; with friends she’d sometimes have six brews in a single evening. Millar, who’d switched from beer to Scotch because of his gout, depended on Johnnie Walker to help him get to sleep. He didn’t have to drink, he insisted; but he took care to ration himself (only after 10 P.M., only a quarter of a fifth per night). He knew his drinking was a problem, a poor substitute for a more active social life.

  But the culture in general depressed him. Wherever he looked things were coming apart, especially among young people. All sorts of delinquency—sexual, criminal, narcotic, vehicular—were on the rise, as dramatized in this year’s hit movie Blackboard Jungle (from a novel by Millar’s Manhunt stablemate Evan Hunter). Here were the citizens of tomorrow: mindless and boorish spawn of a lowbrow populace that preferred Ike to Adlai. When a nasty strain of flu swept the country this winter, Millar equated it with the influenza that accompanied World War I: “the somatic expression of a spiritual malaise which is rocking this country to its foundations.” His fears weren’t just metaph
or. Two of Linda’s best “friend-boys” were killed in car accidents early in 1955. Millar was afraid for his daughter’s safety, so much so that he thought of getting a teaching job and moving the family to Michigan or Ontario. He too felt unfulfilled in California: isolated, bored, often ill, somewhat stalled in his career.

  Which brought him to Michigan in the spring of 1955, where he bought Linda a good secondhand Ford. Until the Millars left Santa Barbara, at least she wouldn’t have to depend on the wretched local bus system. And having her own car would distance her from the dangerous hot-rod crowd.

  Millar drove the sedan (which he dubbed Honeybug) on a two-week solo trip through Michigan and Canada. Ostensibly he was scouting a suitable place to relocate, but the drive soon became a sentimental journey. He visited the Bransons and the Pearces in Ann Arbor, then went to Kitchener and bought himself a sharp Harris Tweed jacket at a department store owned by a former KCI classmate. Through an unseasonable spring blizzard, Millar drove to Ottawa, where he looked up Bob Ford, now head of the Canadian foreign-service European division. Ford, married to a Brazilian woman, was about to have his first book of poetry published (it would win the Governor-General’s Award). He hadn’t seen Millar in seventeen years, but the two resumed talking as easily as if they were still living across the hall from each other in Huron College.

  From Ottawa, Millar drove to London and the University of Western Ontario, where former colleague Frank Stiling rolled out the red carpet. In Toronto he hooked up with his artist uncle Stan Moyer; the two motored to Montreal and back, visiting other relatives along the way.

  Maggie and Linda were due to join Millar in Kitchener. Before flying there, both wrote him with bloodcurdling news from Santa Barbara: two more horrible auto accidents, one involving teenagers Linda knew from school. His daughter filled Millar in on the gory details: “3 were killed, Richard F——, Dorothy G——and some guy called Dick who was decapitated and 3 were very seriously injured, Loretta F——had her face all mangled and the 2 others may die. I knew Loretta because she rode our bus and she was a friend of mine. The way it happened was that the guy, an 18 yr. old who’s getting about 7 yrs. in the clink, who was driving stopped the car on the railroad tracks on purpose. The idea is that they stay on the tracks when a train is coming as long as they can without getting hit by the train. Whoever says to start the car is called ‘chicken’ which is the name of the ‘game.’ Well, the guy couldn’t start the car and they all got hit. Awful isn’t it? Next night there was an article in the paper about the high insurance rates for driving by teenagers and I wrote a letter to the editor about how that only applied to boys. It should be in the editorials demain soir, and I’ll sure make enemies by it.”

  In Kitchener, the three of them visited Maggie’s father and sat for a newspaper photographer, who snapped a dour-looking Maggie, a “gussied-up” Linda, a bemused Millar. After more family visits, the Millars and Honeybug hit the road for California. In Boulder, Colorado, near where Jack Millar mined for silver, they lunched with James Sandoe, the mystery critic and university librarian. Sandoe predicted big sales for Bantam’s just-published collection of Archer short stories. Millar scoffed at the notion, but by the time he got back to Santa Barbara, The Name Is Archer was already in its third printing.

  Linda had behaved poorly at the Sandoes’; Millar apologized by letter (“Linda is usually a cheerful soul, but had been under the weather physically and spiritually”). Her father often had cause to made excuses for Linda. When she was wan with what were probably hangovers, he said she had “scholar’s pallor” from hitting the books too hard. When she was caught smoking or drinking, it was the other kids’ fault. Linda always had some plausible story, and her father always believed it. He knew she never lied.

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  Millar sent his newest Archer manuscript to New York in August. As usual after finishing a book, he felt it was the best he’d ever done, and for once Alfred Knopf agreed, saying this book was “first rate—the best we have had from you in a long, long time. We have no suggestion for changes of any kind. Congratulations.”

  This sixth Archer, strongly written and exciting, gave a private eye’s view of the corrupt doings behind the scenes at Helio-Graff Studios, an independent movie lot run by Simon Graff, a “short, broad-shouldered” mogul modeled physically on Darryl Zanuck.

  Graff’s executive fixer is a spooky security chief named Leroy Frost. Taken to Frost’s office under duress, Archer endures a smarmy sermon on professional friendships and capitalist family values:

  “ . . . I want you to take me seriously, Lew, it offends my sense of fitness when you don’t. Not that I matter personally. I’m just another joe working my way through life—a little cog in a big machine.” He lowered his eyes in humility. “A very big machine. Do you know what our investment is, in plant and contracts and unreleased film and all?”

  He paused rhetorically. Through the window to my right, I could see hangarlike sound stages and a series of open sets: Brownstone Front, Midwestern Town, South Sea Village, and the Western Street where dozens of celluloid heroes had taken the death walk. The studio seemed to be shut down, and the sets were deserted, dream scenes abandoned by the minds that had dreamed them.

  “Close to fifteen million,” Frost said in the tone of a priest revealing a mystery. “A huge investment. And you know what its safety depends on?”

  “Sun spots?”

  Archer’s drawn into this world of fake fronts and false glamour by George Wall, a Toronto sportswriter in search of his estranged wife, Hester, who’s taken up with the dangerous Helio-Graff crowd. As Lew uncovers some of the dark secrets covered up by Frost and others, he finds the seedier side of the Hollywood myth: stage mothers bent on using their kids to secure their own futures, screenwriters whose self-respect goes the way of all first drafts, moguls surrounded by so many yes-men they’ve forgotten the sound of no.

  The Icarus myth is one reference point for this ambitious private-eye novel; Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is another. Millar used all that good Zanuck party material in a bravura sequence set at the fictional Channel Club in Malibu (the first of his many transformations of Santa Barbara’s Coral Casino). The Millars’ late friend M. M. Musselman seems to stand behind Sammy Swift, Archer’s disenchanted scriptwriter pal:

  “I came out here for the kicks, going along with the gag—seven fifty a week for playing word games. Then it turns out that it isn’t a gag. It’s for keeps, it’s your life, the only one you’ve got. And Sime Graff has got you by the short hairs.”

  In this extended party scene (of which Millar was justly proud), the author skewers a slew of Hollywood types as lethally as he satirized the Montecito set in The Drowning Pool. In the club’s drinking room, Archer observes:

  There were actresses with that numb and varnished look, and would-be actresses with that waiting look; junior-executive types hacking diligently at each other with their profiles. . . . Some of their eyes were knowing previews of that gray, shaking hangover dawn when all the mortgage payments came due at once and the options fell like snow.

  Such are the folk who fuel the machine that spreads the corruption that spills to Nevada, where types like Graff front for mob bosses building “legitimate” vice palaces in Vegas. In addition to sociology, satire, and sharp writing, this Archer novel had action. Despite the stand he’d taken with Pocket Books, Millar wasn’t oblivious to publishers’ wants. He wrote plenty of “hero in danger” scenes of the sort Alfred Knopf thought desirable, and there were enough moments of Archer manhandling bad guys to gladden Saul David’s heart. Such passages weren’t add-ons but integral parts of a book as vital as Find a Victim was dreary. This was a terrific return to form: Macdonald’s best book since The Way Some People Die.

  Though Knopf didn’t ask Millar to change a word of it, he did have a perversely disquieting comment for its author: “I do find myself wondering, however, if you are not continuing to work what has become a decreasingly profitable market. I begi
n to suspect that you ought to attempt a serious novel rather than continuing to sweat blood over what the trade looks on as whodunits for which the market is automatically limited.” No doubt Knopf was dismayed at the prospect of not selling more copies of this fine Macdonald than he had of its predecessor, but he seemed to be sending conflicting signals. Knopf had insisted Millar reassure Bantam he wouldn’t stop writing mysteries; now he implied Millar was wasting his time on them.

  Actually, Millar’s career finally seemed to be hitting some sort of stride. Cosmopolitan bought his new book for abridgement (as they had Margaret’s latest); their forty-five-hundred-dollar fee allowed the Millars to pay off the Cliff Drive house’s second mortgage. The producers of Climax, a new sixty-minute CBS-TV show (whose debut play was a live dramatization of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye), expressed interest in adapting something by Macdonald; Millar chose instead though to get involved with a proposed Mystery Writers of America series, for which he did a script of his “Bearded Lady” novelette. His two Dodd, Mead novels were issued again in softcover, bringing extra found money. With good foreign royalties (especially from France), 1955 would be Millar’s most profitable year yet as a freelance writer; he’d gross nearly fourteen thousand five hundred dollars (to Margaret’s seven thousand).