Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Macdonald’s work reached more remote corners. From Moscow, Bob Ford wrote that Blue City (the book dedicated to Ford) would be serialized in the Russian literary review Znamya and The Goodbye Look published in a hundred-thousand-copy edition (Macdonald’s largest printing anywhere). Ford thought Ross Macdonald was the first American detective-story writer to be translated into Russian since Dashiell Hammett. Macdonald’s English visit was paying dividends: Underground Man sold well there; Matt Bruccoli, back from the U.K., reported that Fontana’s new Ross Macdonald paperbacks were attracting great attention in London. They drew grateful notice from best-selling writer (The Savage God) and poetry critic A. Alvarez, who told the London Observer’s readers, “My private literary event this year has been my belated discovery of the novels of Ross Macdonald. I rate him higher than Raymond Chandler, the best in the American thriller genre since Dashiell Hammett. His view of the world is sombre, his prose lucid and restrained. My favourite so far is The Chill, but I am still avidly researching the subject.”

  Macdonald had been linked to Hammett and Chandler in the States for years, but now after his two best-sellers, he was connected to them in a new way: as the contemporary master giving book-jacket imprimaturs to his deceased predecessors. Surely the irony (two or three shades) wasn’t lost on Millar as he provided a blurb for a batch of Chandler paperbacks (“He wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence”) and a hardcover omnibus (“Raymond Chandler wrote with wonderful gusto and imaginative flair”). With considerably more enthusiasm (“I take seriously my membership in the School of Hammett”), Millar sent Green several lines on Hammett for paperback use: “As a novelist of realistic intrigue, Hammett was unsurpassed in his own or any time.” Macdonald also let his name be used to promote a first novel from Knopf, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by a Massachusetts assistant U.S. attorney, George V. Higgins.

  He did much more in order to help launch another first novel: Herb Harker’s Goldenrod. Harker’s wife died before it was published (she lived to see her name on its dedication page). Millar wrote Olding, “We’ll try to keep Herb’s book from going unnoticed.” He asked the New York Times if he could cover Goldenrod, and John Leonard said yes. Macdonald’s nine-hundred-word piece in the Book Review showed Harker’s work about an aging rodeo rider (busted up by a horse named Sundown) and his two sons in as beguiling a light as any novelist might wish for; its last two lines summed up not only the book but its author, the former adult-ed student Millar fourteen years earlier had said should be a writer: “Since a work of fiction is, among other things, a record of the whole experience of creating it, Goldenrod can be read as a version of the author’s struggle to become a modern man and an artist. In a wider arena than the Calgary Stampede he has ridden a more difficult horse than Sundown—the one with wings—and though it nearly threw him once or twice, Harker stayed on.” The book didn’t go unnoticed. It got other good reviews (“Enormously moving . . . the reader feels like cheering”—Publishers Weekly), was a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate, and got bought for filming. “Few husbands have been able to set such a marker on the graves of their wives,” Millar told Harker. He was glad Herb was doing more writing: “It’s a useful recourse, and an endless one. . . . It feeds on memory and pain: I don’t have to explain that to the author of Goldenrod.”

  Millar was feeding some painful memory of his own into a new manuscript in 1972, one that had a lot to do with his daughter, Linda; but he made time to accommodate a number of visitors. Dorothy Olding came to Santa Barbara twice this year; the agent had a growing roster of West Coast clients (thanks mostly to Millar) including Harker, Bob Easton, and Dennis Lynds. Jon Carroll arrived from the Bay Area to do a feature on Macdonald for Esquire. “He was soft-spoken, formal, courteous,” said Carroll. “We talked in a very dark room which was his study. Margaret Millar was out there somewhere, doing something with plants. He was extremely forthcoming, but it occurred to me about halfway through that I should have known a shitload more about Freudian analysis before I began, because I did get the sense he was leaving little clues for the interviewer: literary antecedents, mostly. It was never going to be a piece about his personal life, and he certainly gave me no sense of bonhomie, as though we could have boomed at each other in a manly way and gone catching the big fish together; that didn’t seem to be in the cards.” Carroll’s article showed Millar’s knack at making connections between any two literary points:

  “Have you thought much,” the reporter asked, “about the antecedents of the private detective? Does he go back to”—words failed him and he sought the bookcase for examples—“to, uh, Don Quixote or Samuel Johnson or who?”

  Millar smiled. “I don’t know that he goes back to either of those, although Johnson was a moralist who wrote moral stories, and the detective story is par excellence a morality story. That’s true of Don Quixote too. And in Don Quixote you get the relationship betwen Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, which is something like the relationship between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. In other words, you have a great, somewhat comic figure and a lesser, somewhat comic figure, who holds him down to earth and connects him with ordinary reality.”

  Another interviewer, Toronto journalist Jerry Tutunjian, gave Millar dramatic proof of the surprising reach of Macdonald’s work. “I’m Armenian, originally from Jerusalem,” Tutunjian said. “I’d been in Canada for a couple years in the midsixties when I went back to Jerusalem in 1967 to see my parents. It was the beginning of summer; I was bored. A friend told me, ‘Read this book’—it was The Chill. I’d never heard the name Ross Macdonald; I was not a mystery reader. I took the book home, and a few days later the Six-Day War started. They were shooting, you know: planes blasting, and missiles. Jerusalem is an old city, and the house my parents lived in was on a sort of a hill; at the bottom of the slope was a natural cave. All of us hid in the cave, about thirty or forty of us, cooped up for a couple days while the war was going on; and I was reading The Chill. It was a good diversion. I was sitting at the mouth of the cave so I could have sunlight to read by. There were babies crying, and women. Eventually I had to leave the cave because the women were Moslem, and they didn’t want guys around. I didn’t care; I was reading the book. So I got hooked on Ross Macdonald. When I came back to Canada, I read everything by him I could get my hands on.”

  Sam Grogg made his way to Santa Barbara from Ohio’s Bowling Green University, where he was writing his doctoral dissertation on Macdonald, and interviewed Millar for the Journal of Popular Culture. “I showed up at this beach club, all dressed up to meet this guy who’d written all these books I was in love with,” Grogg said, “and he comes out in a pair of swimming trunks: ‘Hi, how are you.’ I’m not in a tuxedo or anything, but clearly I’m not dressed for the situation. And he said, ‘Come on, I don’t have any trunks that’d fit you, but here, I’ll lend you a pair.’ I put on these big, baggy swimming trunks, we swam a few laps together, and then we came back and popped my tape recorder down and began to talk. I mean, he immediately made me feel at home. He paid attention to me, unlike the other people I was interviewing on that trip like Irving Stone and Irving Wallace. He was a serious man, a very calm man, a man who had literally an aura around him. You could come in as fractured and frantic and youthful and exuberant as you were—and you felt like you were sitting next to a mythical Socrates. I mean, the guy had these blue eyes, and—there was a peacefulness about him, and a wisdom, an understanding, that I think came from his willingness to embrace the nightmarish side of human behavior.

  “On the one hand, he was a guy who could recite Shakespeare and talk about all of American literature and was very interested in architecture and conservation—I remember his gazing out at the ocean, at the offshore oil derricks out there, and there was a look in his eyes: he really did see those derricks as being like the handles of daggers that were stabbing into the ocean floor—all that, on the one hand; and on the other hand, he could also giv
e you some very practical insights. For instance: having come to southern California for the first time, you immediately want to get on the phone and say to your wife, ‘Pack up all your belongings and come on out, ’cause I’m staying here!’ Particularly if you’re in Santa Barbara. And he gave me some very practical advice; he said, in essence, ‘Don’t be a fool.’ We were walking around outside the Biltmore Hotel, and he said, ‘You see that cabana right over there? A double murder occurred there just a few weeks ago. And in the cabana over behind that tree, there was a recent suicide.’ Brought me right back down to earth. He was saying, ‘You may think you’re in the Garden, but the snake is in the garden too.’

  “I think another reason probably why he and I got along was because we didn’t have any political differences. He was certainly intolerant of the conservative mentality, and my background was liberal to the extreme: my dad was a labor organizer in the thirties; Stevenson was a real hero around our house. So there might have been these intangible things that connected me to Macdonald. Maybe he was the replacement father, for a while. I think Ken Millar functioned as the surrogate father to probably hundreds of people. Great communicator. I remember I said I was thinking about coming out and teaching at the University of California at Santa Barbara; they were developing a film and popular-culture program. And he looked at me and said, ‘You don’t want to go over there with those guys.’ It was like Dad—if you have a good relationship with your dad—saying, ‘Don’t do that.’

  “I always felt like the dissertation I wrote about him was fairly inadequate, because I was a little bit mesmerized by him. I kept not wanting to scratch beneath the surface of the books because then I would have to divulge things about his personal life—and I just didn’t want to do it. The privacy of the guy—In many ways he was very accessible, but you didn’t want in any way to break what was a kind of an understanding. He was such a—these words are so sentimental, but—he was such a gentle soul that I just didn’t wanna fuck with it. I just wanted him to be okay, even in the short time that I knew him. If I thought in any way at any point I had done anything to make him feel bad, I would have suffered for the rest of my life.”

  * * *

  Grogg (who went into film and later was associated with such movies as Trip to Bountiful and Kiss of the Spider Woman) was in the advance guard of an academic movement to recognize genre fiction as capable of being literature. But even at Bowling Green, where he was part of Ray B. Browne’s popular-culture-studies division, Grogg’s activities were viewed with alarm, he said: “I was considered to be destroying everything that centuries had built up! Two Victorian scholars in the English Department, Virginia and Lowell Leland, were horrified at what graduate students like me were doing. I was getting a Ph.D. for reading detective novels? Their worst tenured nightmares come true.”

  Still the academy was beginning to take notice of detective novels in the early 1970s, even at the best Ivy League schools. “I can just about put my finger on when that began,” said Max Byrd, in 1972 an assistant professor of English at Yale, “because Ken Millar was involved in that. I got my Ph.D. at Harvard in 1970, and then I taught at Yale for six years before coming out to California. And while I was teaching at Yale, a wonderful professor named Alvin Kernan and another one named Peter Brooks started an experimental course called ‘Literature X.’ One of the things they did was the mystery story as a model for plots; and one of the books we read was The Chill, which I think alternated with The Galton Case. We read those along with Oedipus Rex, Dostoyevsky, Sherlock Holmes, and various others, talking about how the mystery story really was connected at its basic plot level and thematic concerns with these other ‘higher’ literatures, and that there was a continuity. I don’t think anyone had ever done that before in an academic environment. These were very high-powered people giving this course at Yale, and what went on at Yale had its reverberation throughout the whole business. Macdonald’s books were the ones that they went to because they’re so classic: the crime is always uncovering an earlier crime and a still earlier one, and of course there was Macdonald’s avowed oedipal interest. So when they introduced Ross Macdonald into ‘Literature X’ right after Sophocles, that was a pretty daring thing to do, because of the strong distinction then between lowbrow and highbrow. But of course that was about the time when Eudora Welty did her famous book review; and at Yale, anything that comes out of the New York Times rather staggers them! They were busy rethinking that. It was rather daring, that ‘Literature X’ course, and very successful.”

  Byrd, married to a Santa Barbara woman, met Macdonald around 1972. “We would come out to Santa Barbara for part of the summer,” Byrd said. “My in-laws knew Ken Millar from the Coral Casino. I went several times to the every-other-Wednesday writers’ lunches. Then I spent a few evenings over at Ken Millar’s house just chatting, sometimes quite late into the night. Great talker. I was absolutely of no interest I would have thought to anybody, just a beginning teacher; I didn’t see why he would take the time. The thing I remember most was how interested he was in academics. When he found out I did my Ph.D. at Harvard, he was eager to talk about academic literary criticism. His Coleridge dissertation had been turned down by a Harvard reader who became my thesis adviser, a dear friend; Ken said he’d never forgotten that. He brought that up often. He said he still kept up with Coleridge criticism.

  “I also remember his extremely deliberate manner of talking. He kind of set the pace: slowed it down. He was a very observing man. The feeling I had was that he watched very carefully, and that one reason he talked so slowly was to let other people carry on. He really had a dignity about him. You felt you were in the presence of someone extremely serious, and of real stature. Actually my impression was of a very bookish and donnish man; his study was like a professor’s: he just had books all around him. His wife would bring in coffee or a beer from time to time, but she didn’t join in; I don’t know yet what I think about that. We talked about writers, including mystery writers he admired. He said how much he liked Chandler, what a literary kind of writer Chandler was, the stylishness of his books.”

  Byrd, encouraged by the success of Harvard friend Michael Crichton, later wrote several thrillers himself. “Millar as a writer was a very literary man,” said Byrd, “very conscious of putting together something in an artistic way—everything from his style to his sense of the layers of his plot. He was a real craftsman. Other writers, their stories are clearly about figuring out who did it, or having the hero be somehow the dominant figure; but I don’t think of Macdonald’s stories as being about detection so much as narration: how you tell the story. That probably goes back to my feeling that he was a very bookish man, very literary. Archer’s is a much quieter voice, but with a lot of the melancholy that Millar gave off—although other people talked about his being a much more melancholy person than I ever saw him be. But again, I think those talks of ours were quite happy conversations for him; I think he simply liked the idea of scholarly chat. Well, he never really left the university, in some way. We used to talk at Yale how professors so often turned out to be the villains in his books!”

  * * *

  As the academic and mainstream worlds paid more attention to Macdonald, his crime-fiction colleagues seemed perversely to ignore the achievements of the former Mystery Writers of America president. In 1965, when the MWA gave The Spy Who Came In from the Cold a best-novel Edgar, its newsletter cheered, “One of the few mysteries of our time to land on the best-seller lists, THE SPY was a popular choice since it showed that ‘it can be done.’ ” After The Goodbye Look’s 1969 success, though, the MWA’s Hillary Waugh said Edgar choices shouldn’t be influenced by mere popularity. Michael Avallone, much involved with the MWA, wrote Millar in 1969, “Ed Hoch mentioned about a month ago how sorry he is (and ashamed) that Ross Macdonald has never won an Edgar.” Two years later, Avallone told Millar, “I’ve got a ten dollar bet that MWA will give you an Edgar this year for THE UNDERGROUND MAN—a scroll [nomination] is a
cinch.” Avallone lost his bet. No Macdonald novel after 1965’s The Far Side of the Dollar was even nominated for an Edgar.

  “It is sort of odd,” Ed Hoch said later, “especially since he did win both the Gold Dagger and the Silver Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of England. At that time especially, if you were writing about a series character—and I write about several, in short stories, so I know what I’m talking about—it seemed the Edgar committee always wanted either a new character or something entirely different. In the sixties and seventies, Ross Macdonald was writing some of his best books; but they probably said, ‘Well, it’s just another Lew Archer.’ I’m speculating; I was never on the novel committees then. But if that’s what happened, it was a big mistake.”

  Perhaps envy and resentment played their parts. Collin Wilcox told Millar about hearing a panel of detective writers at a fan convention agreeing Ross Macdonald now “had it made.” When Ray Sokolov and John Leonard appeared as guest speakers in 1971 at a New York MWA chapter meeting where Art Kaye’s documentary was shown, they were unexpectedly harangued during a question period by an audience member. “Some woman really got pissed off at the two of us for suppressing the real story about his daughter,” Sokolov recalled. “Thought we’d really been bad journalists. She may actually be right I guess by some standard, since the crucial incident in his life was being genteelly suppressed over and over. It really wasn’t a service to the reading public in a certain way, and I did feel a little embarrassed about it, but—it seemed right at the time. I never knew who this woman was; it was nobody I could identify, and I certainly didn’t try! I just wanted to get out of there.”