Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  I was dreaming about a hairless ape who lived in a cage by himself. His trouble was that people were always trying to get in. It kept the ape in a state of nervous tension. I came out of sleep sweating, aware that somebody was at the door.

  Archer’s early-morning caller is Carl Hallman, as tall and blue-eyed as Kenneth Millar—and an escapee from the state mental hospital. Son of a deceased rancher and political boss in the valley town of Purissima, Carl claims he was railroaded into the asylum by his brother, who Carl says covets their father’s estate. He makes further charges implying the senior Hallman was murdered. Reluctant to help his uninvited guest, Archer realizes, “It was one of those times when you have to decide between your own convenience and the unknown quantity of another man’s trouble.” The detective agrees to look into Hallman’s case if Hallman will go back in the hospital. On their way there, Hallman knocks Archer out and takes his car. The detective makes his way alone to the state hospital—and into a world Linda Millar had lived in for months.

  A sympathetic doctor tells Archer the disturbed Carl is at heart naive and idealistic: potentially a valuable citizen. While in the hospital, Hallman helped care for some of the less able patients, including a heroin addict named Tom Rica, with whom he escaped. Archer knows Rica, a delinquent youth whom Lew once tried to straighten out. Obviously Rica steered Hallman to Archer. The private eye feels guilty ghosts stirring, specters that haunt this most subjective of all the Archer books.

  Lew goes to the run-down house where Hallman’s wife, Mildred, lives with her mother. Like Millar’s childhood home, this place has a fanlight of colored glass over the door, like a window on faded grandeur. There’s a feel here of decades overlapping, of generations feeding on each other. Lipstick stains on the teeth of Mildred’s mother, the alcoholic Mrs. Gley, gleam like blood; we think of a deranged animal eating its young. “Mrs. Gley,” Archer observes, “looked like the wreck of dreams.” Her name brings to mind a line from Jack Millar’s favorite poet, Bobby Burns: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft a-gley.” The self-pitying Mrs. Gley lives in the squalid dark, nursed by drink, soothed by the unreal world of television. Archer glimpses a TV play in which a woman can’t choose between career and children so “settles” for both. In real life, Archer/Millar knows, the children are sacrificed.

  Like Jack Millar, Mildred’s father was an impractical dreamer who left wife and child to fend for themselves. Like Ken Millar, Mildred senses unpleasant feelings sealed in the rooms where unhappy people live: “They’re in the cracks in the walls, the smokestains on the ceiling, the smells in the kitchen.”

  Archer and Mildred go to the Hallman ranch, where modern trappings clash with old oak and adobe in chambers that have the unlived-in feel of natural-history exhibits. The people here—Carl’s brother, Jerry; Jerry’s brassy wife, Zinnie; Grantland, the family doctor—all have false fronts, phony expressions, mask faces. Archer sees his own falseness and failings reflected in theirs.

  In these ranch scenes, Millar scatters more autobiographical fragments. Zinnie and Jerry’s three-year-old, Martha, is a portrait of Linda at that age, speaking clearly (“I want to ring for him, Mummy”), showing irritability (“Don’t spell! You mustn’t spell!”), being tugged at by grown-ups competing for moral custody of a human trophy.

  Details from the Millars’ more recent past were strewn throughout The Doomsters. There are references to pentothol, Thorazine, the cutting of wrists. Mildred, like Linda, twice attempts suicide. “She was a human being with more grief on her young mind than it was able to bear,” Archer says. (In early notes for the novel Millar had Mildred living on “Alisos Street.”) When a distraught Mildred begs, “Leave me alone,” Archer responds, “A lot of people have. Maybe that’s the trouble.” Hidden beneath The Doomsters’ canvas, like a picture visible only by X ray, is a group portrait of three generations of Millars.

  As the seeming price of their wealth and power, the Hallmans carry a “family curse”: a hereditary emotional illness that contributed to the suicide of Carl’s mother, who felt plagued by tormenting “doomsters.” After her death Carl became the family scapegoat, with his father predicting Carl would inherit “his mother’s trouble” and “come to a bad end.” When brother Jerry’s shot dead in the greenhouse, Carl is named chief suspect. Archer tries to find Hallman ahead of a corrupt sheriff and salvage some truth from the family’s web of schizophrenic guilt.

  The Doomsters is bold in its complex design. Part of it unfolds as slow as a stage play; other sections race like a movie thriller. Scenes of realistic violence alternate with sequences that wouldn’t be out of place in a “country house” mystery. Like earlier Macdonalds, this seventh Archer stops at compass points all over the California map. One of its most memorable sets is a motel-cottage bordello with a panoramic Hollywood photomural. The book flashes with many deft Macdonald images: the pink-satin whorehouse bedroom that looks “like the inside of a coffin”; the drug addict whose eyes are “puddles of tar”; coffee grounds stuck in a glass percolator “like black sand in a static hourglass that wouldn’t let time pass”; the Japanese servant whose protective coloration lets him fade into the background, “remote as a gardener bent in ritual over flowers in a print.”

  With its sure pace and crisp prose, The Doomsters belonged with the best of the previous Archers. What was new was its more complex view of behavior. In this book Macdonald said good-bye to the simplistic views and solutions of the hard-boiled school. Archer, in contrast to the title of Chandler’s story Trouble Is My Business, states, “Protection is my business.”

  Encouraged by a woman psychiatric social worker (something Linda once aspired to be), Archer moves away from his too easy good-versus-evil stance and toward a mature understanding. Good and bad, the woman tells Archer, are terms we use to torment ourselves; not living up to them leads to self-hatred: “We think we have to punish somebody for the human mess we’re in, so we single out the scapegoats and call them evil. And Christian love and virtue go down the drain.” Love is the grail that eludes most of the book’s characters. Guilt fills the vacuum of its absence.

  In The Doomsters, Archer strives to give and receive saving love. He doesn’t deny the murderer’s responsibility, but he perceives “an alternating current of guilt” through which the killer’s blame flows “in a closed circuit” to many others, including himself.

  Lew’s plugged into the circuit through Tom Rica, the addict he once tried to help, then gave up on. When Rica turned up again trying to avert disaster, an unthinking Archer showed him the door. It was his own younger self he’d been trying to banish, Lew sees:

  When Tom stood in my office with the lost look on him, the years blew away like torn pieces of newspaper. I saw myself when I was a frightened junior-grade hood in Long Beach, kicking the world in the shins because it wouldn’t dance for me. I brushed him off.

  It isn’t possible to brush people off, let alone yourself. They wait for you in time, which is also a closed circuit.

  In spurning Rica, Archer committed a mortal sin of omission and allowed a murderous cycle to start. Lew’s revelations stun the reader like a boxer’s combination. They stun Archer too; he says he’s nearly ready to believe in the dead Mrs. Hallman’s doomsters: “Perhaps they existed in the sense that men and women were their own doomsters, the secret authors of their own destruction. You had to be very careful what you dreamed.”

  Some of Millar’s worst notebook dreams had come true through his daughter’s troubles. In this novel he’d transformed some of his and her trauma back to fiction—to comprehend it, to exorcise it, and maybe to atone for it.

  Millar sent the typed Doomsters manuscript air express to his agents May 27, 1957. The same day, flush with pride at what he’d achieved, he wrote von Auw:

  The Doomsters, by Ross Macdonald, is in my opinion, always subject to correction; and the opinion of M. and another good writer who read it, the culminating book (though not the last) in the Archer series. For that
reason and others, I like the fact that it runs close to 100,000 words and resist in advance the notion of cutting it down to standard size, or writing it down to standard style. So far as my American hard books are concerned, such Procrustean maneuverings have proved fruitless in the past, and are even more likely to prove so in the future. The mystery and the novel are tending to merge—the tendency is noticeable all over the lot, including my book, and is the most encouraging and will be the most profitable trend in my field. I’ve talked to Boucher about it. Saul David tells me that the most saleable books in his soft-cover department are longer books of some literary standing. Length I have; standing is still in the future; but I’m on my way. I’d borrow money rather than knuckle under to Knopf on this issue. The tendency in the mystery is definitely towards the literary, the psychological, the non-athletic, and incidentally the detective-story. My book is intended to close off an era—rather a big word, but I’m feeling my oats a little—in the “hardboiled” field, and probably will.—My longtime and ultimate project is to find a place to stand from which I can fling some tenderizing salt on the tail of, conceivably, a small new Canadian or North American Karamazov or Quixote. Well, I am feeling my oats. For the present, of course, I’d like to make some money, and I’d like to make it out of Doomsters. The sale of Barbarous Coast, a lesser but good book, was disgusting. I say this without personal feeling against Alfred, and with some knowledge of his problems. I’m sure he was just as disgusted as I was. But if all he sees in my new book is problems, rather than creative opportunities for a publisher, I’m not eager for him to handle it. Maybe we can find a better label than hardboiled, better sponsors than Hammett and Chandler. They’re my masters, sure, but in ways that count to me and a lot of good readers I’d like to sell books to, I’m beginning to trace concentric rings around those fine old primitives.

  Millar’s high spirits were nearly matched by his wife’s. Margaret followed her award-winning Beast in View with another strong book, Vanish in an Instant (partly written during Linda’s crisis), which won top marks from genre reviewers; and her peers elected Maggie president of the Mystery Writers of America. During a ten-day solo stay in New York, she presided with flair at the MWA’s Edgar Awards dinner at Toots Shor’s and gave several newspaper interviews. Both Millars went to Bay Area MWA gatherings this year of her presidency; and on a June Sunday a week before Linda’s eighteenth birthday, the Millars hosted forty-five guests (including Anthony Boucher) at an MWA open house at 518 Bay Road.

  Linda’s continued progress heartened her parents. Millar wrote von Auw, “Things look green after the drought . . . Linda is blooming again.” She graduated high school in the top 30 of a 454-member senior class and would start UC Davis in September. Both civil suits from her accident were settled by midyear: one, the case for damages brought by the parents of the boy killed, was dismissed with prejudice; the other, which sought $45,000 in compensatory damages for the injured boy, ended in a jury awarding $10,800 plus $343 in costs (which Millar paid in full immediately).

  Don Pearce encountered a lively Linda Millar when he drove a new car to Menlo Park this summer. “Linda immediately liked my car,” Pearce said. “It was a real good one. We’d all met somewhere, and Ken said, ‘Okay, Linda, I’m going to give you a special treat: you can ride home with Don Pearce.’ She directed me to their house, and I drove the car a little too fast—not for her, though, she loved it; she said, ‘Let’s make Dad eat some rubber!’ I was at the house a minute before Ken got there in the black Ford convertible, and he was in quite a severe and subdued mood. He thought I’d drive a great deal more slowly, and I can see the reason for it: he’d had enough of fast automobiles for a while. But she was just as happy as could be. I’m sure she would have loved to have driven the car, but . . .”

  With Linda departing soon for college, her parents now considered their leaving Menlo Park too. Despite being close to the Bouchers and to first-rate San Francisco jazz clubs, the Millars never felt quite settled in the Bay Area. An exotic plan began forming, inspired by Millar’s friend (and Linda’s godfather) Bob Ford being Canada’s ambassador to Colombia. After Linda’s first Davis semester, the three Millars would move to Bogotá, where Linda could attend a good university. Margaret was willing, and the Fords were enthusiastic. But that idea was trumped by an even more daring one: returning to Santa Barbara. Margaret thought of that town as her home, and leaving it made Millar see how much he liked it too. Being away was like living in exile.

  So in August 1957, the Millars—accompanied by a Scotty pup named John Ross Macdonald Jr.—ended their northern exile by quietly moving back to the city they’d fled only twelve months before.

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  “Ever since the days of Francis Galton psychologists have been concentrating on the importance of individual differences. . . .”

  —Margaret Millar, The Invisible Worm

  The leased house the Millars moved into, 1843 Camino de la Luz, was on Santa Barbara’s mesa only a few blocks from their old Cliff Drive home. Small but charming, it overlooked the ocean; a lighthouse was a hundred fifty feet away. Both Millars loved the house. (By September, Linda was living at UC Davis, near Sacramento.) There was beach access by a wooden, cliffside staircase, and Millar’s bedroom-study picture window had a terrific view of the Pacific; on lucky days you saw whales swimming. Millar, pulled toward the ocean all his life, thought this a perfect setting for the start of what felt like a new chapter in his work and history. He wrote Knopf, “It looks like an interesting decade coming up.”

  Gazing at the Pacific, Millar often thought of his sea-captain father. Jack Millar’s son now continued a family tradition by renting a sailboat for three dollars a day from the Santa Barbara marina. “It was an eighteen-footer, I think, with a nice mainsail and jib,” said Don Pearce, who sometimes crewed for Millar. “Ken taught me what to do: how to handle the line and how to bring sail over at the call of ‘Ready about’; then the next command, ‘Helm’s alee,’ when the helm goes over. You learn very quickly, it’s no big deal. But Ken always took things very very importantly; there was never anything halfhearted about him. So here’d be the two of us way out in the ocean, or just clearing the harbor for that matter, and he’d say, ‘Rea-deee! A-booout!’ And then: ‘Helllm’s! A-leee!’ We were just turning the boat forty-five degrees or something, but he would have a very serious look—this was a great, important public occasion: the Boat, is being Turned, in its Course! Nobody else in the wide wide world would do that. But that’s what one loved about him.”

  Pearce had twenty years’ experience tempering his sail to Millar’s moods. Newer acquaintances weren’t always so sure what to make of him. Writer Robert Easton at first thought Ken Millar was one of the rudest fellows he’d ever met. Tall and gentlemanly, Easton had been a rancher, a radio station owner, and an oil company engineer; his 1940 book, The Happy Man: A Novel of California Ranch Life, was called a minor classic. He met Millar at the writers’ lunch at Harry’s El Cielito and later wrote, “Hostility toward life apparently including me seemed to seethe just beneath his surface.” But Millar invited him for a sail, and the two men hit it off. Still, Millar took getting used to, Easton said: “He could maintain long silences. I mean monumental ones.” Sometimes he’d show up without warning at Bob and Jane Easton’s house (Jane was the daughter of author Max Brand) and sit without speaking, “until one of us asked if he had anything on his mind. He’d smile, say, ‘Yes,’ sit there for a while longer, then get up and leave.”

  English poet and critic Donald Davie, a bluffly handsome Yorkshireman teaching for a year at UCSB, was at first put off by Millar’s demeanor. “Ken was an unusually controlled person,” Davie recalled. “He radiated a sort of calm which seemed unnatural, you know? I was a little daunted. There was suspicion on my part to begin with; he was taking very seriously the Freudian understanding of psychological life, and I was much more skeptical about psychoanalytic techniques. Then o
f course I hadn’t read his books, and, yes, I must admit I had a snobbish prejudice against the detective thriller as a genre.”

  But the Ph.D.’s got past their wariness and onto common ground. Davie read and praised Millar’s Coleridge dissertation and encouraged him to revise it for publication; Millar tried to interest Knopf in Davie’s poetry. Don and Doreen Davie, living this year of Kenner’s sabbatical in the nearby Kenner house on Bluff Drive, for a while called frequently at the Millar place. “Looking back, it seems we were a little tactless,” Davie allowed. “I’m not blaming his wife for after a while resenting the extent to which we took their hospitality for granted, but a certain tension built up between us and Margaret. I think this was common among Ken’s friends. Almost from the very first, Margaret made it plain that her life was different, and that, although she was perfectly civil to us, there was a distance to be maintained. After the very first couple of times, I don’t even believe that Ken and Margaret and my wife and I were part of the same conversation. Margaret used to go to bed, you know?”

  “M. is more chipper than she’s been for years,” Millar maintained to von Auw. Margaret was indeed glad to be back in Santa Barbara, but she kept a low profile. “I got the sense that Ken and Margaret were sort of testing the waters,” said Davie. “If they’d made themselves conspicuous, then the whole thing about Linda might have blown up again.” Harris Seed said, “Margaret didn’t want to go through things that reminded her of Linda’s difficulties. She did not care to be around many people very much. Ken honored that. For a while they became quite reclusive.”

  Still Margaret exercised her prerogative to criticize her husband publicly when she felt he deserved it—as on the day he recited a Lorca poem to Don Pearce. “He was saying it out in a chantlike way,” Pearce recalled, “ ‘Green, I want you, green . . .’ Margaret came into the room and just made him stop it, said he was absolutely making some sort of fool of himself and this was not the way for a person of any maturity to behave. She left after having said some other disapproving things; and he said to me, out loud so that she could hear, ‘Well, that just goes to illustrate the fact that in the modern world, a man cannot be a poet and live in pleasure with his wife.’ It was all pretty controlled on the surface, I guess, but there was a volcano in that relationship at the bottom. Ken tried to romanticize their verbal violence by saying that Frieda and D. H. Lawrence fought ‘like ravening tigers, like sporting serpents.’ The truth is he was under constant strain.”