by Tom Nolan
An oval of sunlight from one of the ports, moving reciprocally with the motion of the yacht, fluttered against the bulkhead like a bright and living soul.
Her graying head was marcelled in neat little waves, all alike, like the sea in old steel engravings.
A moon like a fallen fruit reversing gravity was hoisting itself above the rooftops.
An owl flew low over our heads, silent as a traveling piece of fog.
In The Chill, Macdonald wrote at the height of his mature style and near the peak of his vision. The book expressed the unity that Millar and Cleanth Brooks and Coleridge thought art should have: a balance in which every element is in sync with all others, with each part pulling its weight. The Chill’s characters hum with vitality—such as Helen Haggerty, the racy college teacher. An ash-blonde with a tanned body, stylish clothes, and a fast line of sexy banter, the pouty-mouthed Haggerty prowls Pacific Point with “a restless predatory air”; her scenes have a special sizzle.
Also memorable is Haggerty’s father, a retired policeman Archer visits in Illinois after Helen’s murder. Lew finds the old cop drinking himself into a stupor, boozily beating himself up over the death of a daughter he helped drive away. In an extended sequence as powerful as anything in Macdonald’s oeuvre, Archer tails the ex-cop through a deranged walking tour of the past, a surrealistic journey of dark humor and glaring truth.
Brilliantly conceived and beautifully written, The Chill was a Macdonald masterwork. “It is with The Chill that he found his own voice,” wrote Otto Penzler, “the voice that would prove to influence an entire generation of crime writers.” Critic David Lehman put The Chill on his 1985 Newsweek list of ten favorite crime novels of the twentieth century.
On its release, though, The Chill provoked violent dislike in at least one faithful Macdonald reader: Donald Ross Pearce.
Millar’s old friend bought the new Lew Archer even though he and its author were no longer speaking. “I guess I was still hooked on Ken in a way,” he said. The Chill gave him a jolt. In the midst of his marital turmoil, Pearce had seen a psychiatrist who said some things to him that Pearce repeated to Millar. He found these statements transposed into dialogue spoken by Dean Bradshaw. “I gradually saw that I was in a way sort of being partly the model for that character,” Pearce said. More disturbingly, Pearce perceived his second wife “caricatured and parodied” in the book. “At that time,” he said, “it was quite a blow.”
Don Pearce did with The Chill what Lew Archer does in that book when he finds a lurid newspaper story about Dolly Kincaid: “I read half of it and threw it in the trash.”
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The once omnipresent private eye has dwindled almost into obscurity. From glut they have become collectors’ items. The routine snarl and snap of Brett Halliday’s Mike Shayne is not to be taken seriously, but there is a genuine snap to the inquiries of Joe Puma and Brock (The Rock) Callahan as William Campbell Gault reports them.
—James Sandoe, Library Journal, 1963
THE ZEBRA-STRIPED HEARSE, by Ross Macdonald (Knopf). This is Mr. Macdonald’s twelfth performance in the manner that Dashiell Hammett invented, that Raymond Chandler elaborated, and that he himself has refined, and it is a model of his excellence. That is to say, it has character, statement and style.
—The New Yorker, 1963
The Hollywood Knickerbocker was a hotel full of history. Dashiell Hammett (who died in 1961) was staying at the Knickerbocker in 1931 when he hooked up with a twenty-year-old script reader from Metro named Lillian Florence Hellman Kober. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, who had his office in the fictitious Cahuenga Building, ate at the coffee shop at the “Mansion House Hotel”—a Knickerbocker pseudonym. William Faulkner lived in the Knickerbocker in the 1930s; D. W. Griffith died there in 1948. Maggie Millar roomed at the Knickerbocker during her wartime Warners stint; and Millar stayed there in June of 1959, when “the mystery of the missing coed” was on every front page in town.
Millar returned to the Hollywood Knickerbocker on the night of Friday, April 19, 1963, for the southern California chapter of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Awards dinner (held simultaneously with the main event at New York’s Hotel Astor). Ross Macdonald’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse was one of six books nominated for the MWA’s Best Novel Edgar Award. Millar thought he had a decent shot at winning, but he’d thought that last year too, with his first-ever Edgar nomination for The Wycherly Woman, and Wycherly lost to a book by England’s John Creasey. He’d tried taking that loss lightly: “I felt I deserved to win,” he explained to Wycherly dedicatee Dorothy Olding, “having a high opinion of my work (except when I am writing it, when it seems uniformly and interminably hopeless and un-pull-out-able), but I didn’t expect to . . . . Giving it to Britishers (last year: Julian Symons) tends to avoid civil war within the organization. He said philosophically.” (If the MWA was so worried about hurting people’s feelings, Olding responded, why give awards at all?)
Millar was only cautiously optimistic about his Zebra prospects for the Edgar, though he made his agents the Poe-like promise “I’ll keep knocking at that chamber door.” Surely though he had a better-than-average chance with The Zebra-Striped Hearse, which got not only the by now expected raves from the genre reviewers but impressive notices from more mainstream sources. Los Angeles Times book critic Robert Kirsch, giving Hearse the same solo treatment he gave “real” novels, said of Macdonald, “He is a master of the lost art of plotting. His characterizations, even the most minor, are superb. And he manages to evoke the Southern California scene in all its special qualities as few novelists can. . . . Then, of course, there is the Macdonald style, which is enough to make writers crawl with envy. Not a word is wasted, not a nuance thrown away.” Roger Sale in the Hudson Review praised Macdonald’s vision of the “lives of quiet bourgeois desperation that are the legacy of California’s passionate belief in unreality . . . [T]he real news about California [is] coming via private eye.”
Gerald Walker had broken Macdonald out of the mystery-roundup ghetto first, with a review of The Wycherly Woman on the book page of the New York Post. There were also the first nods of recognition from the academy; UCLA doctoral candidate Carolyn See cited Macdonald works in her dissertation on “the Hollywood novel.”
There was a growing awareness that Macdonald was reshaping the private-detective story, putting his personal stamp on the form as distinctively as had Hammett and Chandler. Robert F. Jones wrote the first feature article on Ross Macdonald (“A New Raymond Chandler?”) for Los Angeles magazine in 1963. “I’d been in the navy in Long Beach but mainly at sea, so I was looking at LA and its environs pretty much with a fresh eye,” said Jones, later a suspense novelist. “I’d been an avid reader of Chandler in the Midwest when I grew up, and—well, looking around LA as a Time reporter, I didn’t recognize the Los Angeles that Raymond Chandler had written about. But when I started reading Macdonald, I saw LA. That just sort of indicates how rapidly Los Angeles was evolving. I found him much more on the money with the way things were, much more in keeping with the spirit of that particular period. He knew the town, he knew the California feel.”
Jones talked with Millar at the Coral Casino and then at Chelham Way. “He was a very pleasant, very outgoing man,” Jones found, “articulate and smart as hell.” Puffing a filter-tipped cigarette, Millar told Jones, “I’ve tried to write honest social history as best I could. So did Chandler, and Hammett before him. But the Hollywood Chandler wrote about has exploded. It’s not there anymore, if it ever was. The mobsters and toughs are gone too, or changed into something less noticeable. In my earlier books, Archer was really hard-boiled, iconoclastic, and dealt with these people. But lately, Archer is turning out more like me. . . . I’m not a hard-boiled guy. Archer is much less the big cheese than Marlowe was. What I’m interested in is other people, and Archer is a means to examine them. My main theme, I really think, is the possibility of communicati
on between men and women, and the tragedy that occurs when that communication breaks down. Failure of communication is built right into the form of the detective novel. Everybody’s holding back, and at best you get only a salutation. That’s what all the mystery is about.”
However much Millar wanted Archer not to be “the big cheese,” but only a sort of ironic Greek chorus to the action, readers clearly found Lew Archer interesting in his own right. As Gerald Walker wrote in the New York Post, “Macdonald’s detective, Lew Archer, is no ‘eye’; he’s a whole man. You even feel he exists between books, a little bleakly perhaps, but he lives nonetheless. He is someone with a sorrow in his past, a bad marriage, and the sour memory of his lost blond wife will assail him in his most vulnerable moments.”
Appreciation of Macdonald beyond the mystery field was pioneered by Anthony Boucher, who’d been calling him a serious novelist for over a decade. Boucher had been crucial to Millar’s career from the night they met in San Francisco in 1945, when Boucher inspired him to write his first private-eye stories; Boucher’s public and private encouragement had buoyed him ever since. “Tony really made Ken Millar,” said mystery writer Dorothy B. Hughes, herself an important reviewer. “He used to praise him so much, I said to him one time, ‘Tony, I think you’re in love with Ken Millar.’ He took me seriously! He took it as a homosexual reference; his cheeks turned absolutely bright red, and he said, ‘No—that’s not true! That’s not true!’ ” In 1951, Millar told Boucher, “I write for you more than any one single person (even Maggie who tough though she is is tough in a feminine way and just a leetle repelled by the masculine sort).” Through letters and visits, the Millars befriended the Bouchers. Once upon a time Linda Millar thought of one Boucher son as her boyfriend.
How long ago that all seemed in 1963, when Linda gave birth (on April 1) to a boy named James, making the Millars grandparents, something that seemed to give them a new lease on life, or at least new pleasure in it. “Gramps is fine,” Millar wrote the Bransons, “. . . in fact so fine that I keep my fingers crossed in fear of fate. . . . Grandma is fine, too, and reveling in the role, dividing her time between the birds and the books.” As for the grandson: “He’s one of the lights of our life.” The Millars enlivened their own home with a boisterous German shepherd pup, Brandy; and they continued their birding trips in 1963, one of which took them to Monterey for the western Audubon Convention, where Coleridge scholar Millar saw his first albatross.
How nice it would be for Ross Macdonald to win the Edgar in this good year—especially since Maggie already had one of those clay busts of Poe. His books were getting more popular; “Mr. Macdonald writes mysteries that even appeal to people who don’t ordinarily read mysteries,” Publishers Weekly said, adding that there were nearly 2 million Ross Macdonald Bantams in print. (For perspective: 1962 MWA president John D. MacDonald, published almost exclusively in softcover, had sold 25 million paperbacks.) But sales didn’t cut any ice with MWA voters; also there was that English bias to contend with, and half the six Edgar finalists this year were British.
Millar trekked to the Hollywood Knickerbocker for the Edgar dinner anyway, joining such colleagues as Thomas B. Dewey, Charlotte Armstrong (who’d won an Edgar the year after Maggie), and Dorothy B. Hughes. Also present was Elizabeth Linington, aka Dell Shannon, another nominee this year. Ned Guymon came from San Diego. Anthony Boucher emceed.
Though the Best Novel Edgar went to English writer Ellis Peters, Millar got to go to the podium anyhow to accept his “scroll” (a glorified sheet of paper) for Zebra’s nomination. He’d come prepared, win or lose, with something to recite. True-crime writer Edward D. Radin’s book on Lizzie Borden (which maintained her innocence of the ax murders of her father and stepmother and criticized a 1937 Edmund Pearson work exonerating a suspect named Bridget) prompted many revisionist stanzas of the “Lizzie Borden took an ax” jingle. Millar wrote his own:
While Lizzie Borden was no saint,
A murderer Radin proves she ain’t.
Let Pearson in his coffin fidget:
The bloody dress belonged to Bridget . . .
In old blood Pearson dipped his quill
And proved that Bridget did not kill.
She was too young to be his mother:
He must have been her long-lost brother.
Millar’s lines brought down the house, and he left the dais on a high note. “By God, I believe I’ll win next year,” he told Dorothy Hughes, knowing what a strong contender he had in The Chill. “Maybe you will,” the competitive Hughes genially answered. “I don’t have a book coming out.”
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MYSTERY OF THE MISSING SCROLL
Ross Macdonald was given a Scroll at the Edgar Awards dinner but went home empty-handed. It seems someone inadvertently carried it off with them, possibly stuck in a program.
—The March of Crime, Southern California MWA
In a purely personal opinion, The Chill is the finest of Mr. Macdonald’s prestige works.
—Dorothy B. Hughes, New York Herald Tribune
More people are saying the right things about your work, and I begin to wonder when their views will really filter through to the general public.
—Alfred Knopf to Ken Millar, 1964
If he thought something worth doing, Millar did it with complete commitment, be it writing a novel, learning to high dive, critiquing a manuscript, or making a marriage. He brought the same intensity to bird-watching, which he pursued with a scholar’s zeal and a trustee’s sense of responsibility. He got involved. With Maggie, Ken Millar helped found the Audubon’s Santa Barbara chapter and took part in the Christmas bird count in which cities competed to spot the most species. Millar even made bird-watching athletic: “On one occasion,” Margaret wrote of a Christmas count, “when sea birds were blanketed by a deep fog, Ken swam three-quarters of a mile in a fifty-two degree ocean to get us a pair of horned grebes for our list.”
That sort of commitment drew Millar in 1964 into a political fight to stop a proposed ridge road along the Sierra Madre, near the Los Padres National Forest; experts said the road threatened one of the few remaining habitats of a bird as rare as the Maltese Falcon. Ken Millar turned the matter into a moral battle.
At stake was the California condor, the largest land bird in North America and perhaps the world. The condor vulture, with its ten-foot wingspan and soaring flight, had an awesome beauty. Only forty or fifty of these Ice Age descendants were left, and they used the mountains north of Santa Barbara as an unofficial sanctuary. The Forest Service proposed opening that area to the general public. More human traffic would mean a bigger fire hazard, Millar said, and greater chance of condors being shot. (Though condors were protected by law, people killed them anyway.) Condors were easily spooked into abandoning the few eggs they laid. If this road was allowed, Millar and other Santa Barbarans including Bob Easton feared, the condor might become extinct.
Forest Service officials treated these citizens’ concerns as a joke, which infuriated Millar. The condor was an underdog, and he fought for underdogs. “Anyone, anything, being victimized reminded Ken of his own painful experience,” Easton said, “and was apt to rouse a fiercely personal response.” Millar began stirring up publicity. Through the bird-watchers network, the Millars met Brooks Atkinson, former New York Times drama critic turned roving Times columnist. Millar thought him one of the finest men he’d ever met: “a wonderful madman,” he told Olding, “much better on nature and stuff than he ever was on plays.” During Atkinson’s January 1964 Santa Barbara stay, Millar arranged a trip on which the Times man saw ten condors; Atkinson wrote several columns on the birds’ plight.
Once Millar got the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society involved on the condors’ behalf, the U.S. Forest Service agreed to hold a Santa Barbara hearing and let people speak for and against the road. On February 27, before an overflow crowd of more than a hundred at the Municipal Recreation Center, Mi
llar (Information Officer, Santa Barbara Audubon Society) read a forceful speech. “Do we have to reveal ourselves as pleasure-greedy and frivolous and shortsighted,” he asked, “with no thought for generations later than ourselves or forms of life other than our own? Basically, there is no form of life other than our own, and wherever we threaten life, be it only the life of an albatross or a condor, we threaten ourselves. . . . Some few things are so rare and ancient and valuable that they can’t be improved by development, so fragile that they can’t be carelessly exposed. Let us leave the condor alone.”
Those in favor of the road included a fellow who suggested these condor lovers simply shoot and stuff the birds and view them at leisure. (“This one made even the Regional Forester look uncomfortable,” Millar wrote.) At the end of the meeting, the Forest Service official decreed that since there were “extremists” on both sides, he’d make a decision somewhere in the middle. “Which seemed to imply,” thought Millar, “that he would decide to ruin the wilderness just a little, for the present, and permit the condor to survive for a few more years, perhaps.”
Largely thanks to Millar, this Santa Barbara meeting was covered by the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times and prompted editorials in the Washington Post and the Washington Star. Millar himself wrote a first-person article for Sports Illustrated, “A Death Road for the Condor,” which was as tautly ironic as a Lew Archer short story; it was read into the Congressional Record. The regional forester postponed a decision on the road pending further study. Millar and company kept up the pressure.