Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  “Same with their grandson, a charming young man. He called to ask if he should visit, and Margaret said, ‘Oh, I told him if he wanted to come, fine, if not, don’t bother, do what he pleased.’ Said that in front of Ken. You imagined this man sitting there, seeing everything he cared about slipping away from him. There was so much shut up inside him. Well, there is in everybody, but—It just seems to me especially cruel; the things that happened to him.

  “Like Ken said . . . He looked at me and he said, ‘I can’t write.’ And he looked at his hands.

  “It was the cruelest thing of course that could happen to anyone, but especially to Ken, I think. Just the very cruelest that could have come over him.”

  Maggie told Welty she would soon put Millar in a nursing home. When Welty only looked away, she added, “Well, he’s not going to get any better, you know, it’s just going to get worse. He’ll be just like a vegetable.”

  “I mustn’t judge her,” Welty said later, “she had a hard time. Putting him in a nursing home, to me that seemed so awful. Of course I can see now that probably was the only way they could handle his physical needs. Because he began to take falls, without warning. He fell several times with all of his weight, this big six-foot man who weighed a hundred and eighty pounds or whatever he was. To fall, without catching himself, and people couldn’t even lift him, he was bigger than they were. That would take him by surprise, you see.”

  Welty was glad she went to Santa Barbara. “It turned out fine,” she said, “because he did know me.” Sipper agreed. “She could reach him,” he said. “Ken would have these moments of lucidity, and when she was around, he had more of them as far as I could see. He didn’t just sit silently and gaze off into the distance as much. He responded to her.”

  Welty spent most of her visit simply talking to Millar. “I told him about a trip I’d made on that crack transcontinental Canadian train that goes from Montreal out to Vancouver,” she said. “I told him I’d thought of him so often, crossing Ontario and all those places, and that when I’d get off sometimes between trains, for instance in Winnipeg, I’d remember he’d written about a school he’d been to there, so I thought, ‘This is where Ken was, this is where he would be, this is what he would see.’ And his eyes just lit up at the place names, he knew exactly what I was talking about, and he would join in with some things.

  “I told him that at one part of the trip they stopped the train because of an earth slide in front of us, and its sister train that starts at the Vancouver end had to stop for the same reason. So what they did was take everybody off each train and switch ’em, and the trains just went back where they’d come from! This kind of appealed to him, I think. And I said, ‘So that was the best part of the trip, ’cause we went on a bus into Medicine Hat.’ And he knew the name of the bus: he said, ‘Moose Mountain bus.’ Yes! It’s what it was. And I said, ‘We saw elks running along,’ and he, he could just see, he could just see that road! And he was just so alive to it all, and he remembered. So I remembered as much as I could, because everything I could tell him was something that rang a bell. It was amazing. But I was thrilled, because it turned out that we could really talk, just like we’re talking now. You know it both broke your heart, and—you realized how much would go through his mind, even fleetingly, and clue him in on something, and he knew it. And I know so much of his boyhood was with him all the time, and he could call on it if he needed to.”

  One day Welty and Millar sat alone in the beach club cabana. “You could look out into the harbor there,” she said, “and see those oil platforms that had always upset Ken so, that he wrote that mystery about, with the oil spill and everything. And he didn’t know what they were. But he looked out there and he said, ‘There’s something wrong about those. . . He said, ‘They don’t belong there, do they?’ ”

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  As I hope my books make clear, there’s no retreat from the “California experience,” as visiting critics call it. It’s like a furnace which uses you up, leaving nothing at the end but a spoonful of fine ash and the record of enormous fantasies.

  —Ken Millar to Dorothy Olding, 1968

  And the

  Ancient

  Mariner

  beholdeth his native country.

  Oh! dream of joy! Is this indeed

  The light-house top I see?

  Is this the hill? Is this the kirk?

  Is this mine own countree?

  —S. T. Coleridge

  The day after his sixty-seventh birthday, Millar moved into Cliff View Terrace, a private rest home on the Santa Barbara mesa: perhaps the eighty-fifth place he’d lived in. “It was a nice home,” said Bob Easton, “down on Cliff Drive oddly enough, maybe half a mile from where Ken and Maggie once lived.” Another Archeresque circle closed. “I’d go and see him there,” Easton said, “and Margaret would, and Ralph Sipper, and others. He’d recognize you in a sense, but in a sense he didn’t know you were there. He’d talk almost like we’re talking here for a time—and then just wander right off it. But he never got violent, the way some Alzheimers do. And he didn’t give the impression of being unhappy, of being penned up against his will. You’d say, ‘Well, Ken, I’ll see you later.’ He’d say, ‘I’ll see you later.’ ”

  “The romantic image of it is to say that he withdrew into himself like a monk,” said Bill Ruehlmann, some of whose family also had Alzheimer’s disease, “like Ken slowly closing the door. Actually the brain cells are going away, and you’re becoming catatonic.”

  Herb Harker went to visit Millar at Cliff View, where he watched his friend try to sip water from a flower vase and heard him speak sentences that didn’t add up (“I think I’ll go and wash out the tugget. I can’t spend my life at this”). “I could have wept,” Harker wrote. “In all ways, in his countenance, his dress, his posture, his quiet demeanor, his controlled speech and action, his gentleness—in all of these, he was scarcely discernible from the man I had known. But the towering thing about him, his mind, had left him. And it was hard to watch him grope for something to pull against. He was like a lone fisherman in a heavy sea, who has lost his oars.”

  Near the anniversary of his daughter’s birthday on June 18 (Linda would have been forty-four), Millar had “a cerebrovascular accident” and was admitted to Cottage Hospital for three days. On June 23 he was transferred to Pinecrest, where Warren Zevon once spent time. “I told them I wouldn’t authorize any steps to extend his life artificially in hospital,” Margaret Millar said. “That was what we had agreed a long time ago to do for the other if a decision like that had to be made.” Kenneth Millar, aged sixty-seven, died on Monday, July 11, 1983.

  He was mourned under two names from Santa Barbara to Moscow. The wide appeal of his books could be gauged by the range of publications carrying news of his death: the New York Times, Daily Variety, the Times of London, Rolling Stone. Ross Macdonald’s passing made the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Dailies around the country printed critical appreciations: the Los Angeles Times (by Charles Champlin), the Detroit News (Clifford A. Ridley), the Virginian-Pilot and the Ledger-Star (William Ruehlmann), the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner (Mikal Gilmore). The Washington Post paid tribute in an editorial.

  Several people wrote personal reminiscences. Wall Street Journal staffer Rich Jaroslovsky did the story he couldn’t bring himself to file while Millar was alive. Frank MacShane (later an Alzheimer’s sufferer) remembered Millar for the New York Times Book Review. Paul Nelson, never able to craft a Macdonald profile without mentioning things he’d promised not to, instead wrote a memoir of Millar for Rolling Stone. Santa Barbara cartoonist Charles Schulz drew a Peanuts comic strip in which Lucy asked would-be author Snoopy: “You want your book to sell, don’t you? You know what they always put on the covers of books they want to sell? ‘In the tradition of Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald.’ ”

  There were obituaries in English, German, and Swiss newspapers. BBC radio broadcast
a ten-minute discussion of his work. Julian Symons wrote pieces for the Sunday Times and for London magazine. Many would clearly miss not only the books but the man behind them. “It’s sad that we have to lose at the same moment a character like Lew Archer from American fiction and a writer as intelligent and decent as Ross Macdonald,” CBC producer Robert Weaver told the Toronto Star. Macdonald meant a great deal now in Canada, where writers like Howard Engel, Ted Wood, and Eric Wright were finally creating an indigenous mystery fiction, forty years after Margaret Millar’s Ontario books and twenty-four years after Archer went north in The Galton Case. Macdonald was commemorated by the Toronto Star, the Toronto Globe and Mail, the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, and the Montreal Star.

  In his adopted town of Santa Barbara, the alternative paper News & Review put Ross Macdonald on its cover. Here Millar was recalled as much for his civic activism as for his books. James G. Mills wrote the News-Press, “Several years back, on the death of News-Press artist-writer Dick Smith, [Millar] praised Dick for having tried to keep alive the birds, plants and animals . . . stating that the whole living county was his monument. We could say the same of Ken Millar.”

  The Foundation for Santa Barbara City College, for whom Millar had taught a night class a quarter century earlier, started a Macdonald memorial fund; and Millar was given a posthumous award. A writing group was named for him; this Millar-commemorating group held classes at Linda Millar’s old grade school, across from the Millars’ first Santa Barbara home at 2124 Bath. “It was so strange,” said Margaret. “We had been living in the house right across the street when he wrote his first [Macdonald] book. And that he should get an award there for the body of his work . . . It was a nice irony for a change.”

  It was Macdonald’s year for prizes. Within a month of his getting the Robert Kirsch Award, the Private Eye Writers of America voted him its first Life Achievement Award (“The Eye”).

  Detective fiction, Millar sometimes said, was his “accommodation”—to the need for a form to channel his talent, and to his vow to make a living through fiction. But the private-eye tale was much more to Millar than a blueprint and a meal ticket. In his books he wrestled with the worst and better angels of his nature. Knowledgeable critics felt he achieved things with the mystery that had never before been done. Geoffrey O’Brien, author of Hardboiled America, wrote, “Macdonald’s narratives are beautifully built machines in which the constructional genius of an Agatha Christie is wedded to a gift for writing about flesh-and-blood people in real and contemporary places. This particular combination of talents had not often, if ever, occurred in the mystery field (earlier on, it was declared an impossibility by Raymond Chandler . . . ).” John McAleer, Rex Stout’s biographer, said Millar did what Chandler couldn’t: “In his last major novel, The Long Goodbye, [Chandler] tried to reconcile the hard-boiled detective story with the novel of manners, which he now recognized as the true matrix of the detective story. His principal disciple, Ross Macdonald, completed this reconciliation after Chandler’s death.” Julian Symons thought it pointless to compare the mature Macdonald with Chandler or Hammett: “Macdonald’s achievement is wholly individual, unique in the modern crime story.”

  Several literary commentators felt Macdonald’s achievement extended significantly beyond the crime genre. “Ross Macdonald is one of the central authors of his time and place,” wrote George Grella. “Finally, his novels may be the truest of any, in his lifetime, in America.” Matthew Bruccoli stated, “The twelve novels from The Galton Case to The Blue Hammer constitute a quest cycle; taken together, they form one of the splendid achievements in American fiction.” Frank MacShane called Macdonald simply “one of the best writers of his generation.”

  Millar thought the future of mystery fiction was to merge with the novel—to return to where it began, in the realistic imaginings of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins (completing another circle). In the years since his death, the blurring of genres that began when The Goodbye Look made the front page of the New York Times Book Review accelerated, with literary authors (Norman Mailer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Umberto Eco) writing metamysteries, and new thriller writers (Scott Turow, Ruth Rendell, Peter Hoeg) displaying styles worthy of any Knopf or Faber and Faber novelist. Surely Ross Macdonald spurred some of this cross-genre traffic, if only by showing how seriously crime fiction could be written and taken.

  All sorts of authors admired him: Iris Murdoch, Thomas Berger, John Fowles, Charles Portis, David Hare, Stephen Sondheim, Joyce Carol Oates. The writer who was never at home in any country wrote books that were read all over the world. After his death, Macdonald’s southern California novels continued to be published in England, France, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Finland, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, Argentina, Greece, Japan. Lawrence Block, an MWA Grandmaster, wrote how he and his wife once found themselves in West Africa for three weeks with nothing to read: “Then, in our hotel in Lome, the capital of Togo, I discovered five Lew Archers, secondhand paperbacks that had been badly printed in India. The newsdealer wanted an extortionary ten dollars apiece for them, and I paid it willingly. They sustained us all the way back to JFK. Of course we had read them all before, some of them two or three times. It didn’t matter. . . . Wonderful books.” Macdonald was one of the writers Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood, A Wild Sheep Chase, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World) gorged himself on as a teen in Kobe in the middle 1960s: “I go to the used-book stores and buy a dozen very cheap Ross Macdonald, Dashiell Hammett, Ray Bradbury . . . Raymond Chandler.”

  Macdonald’s appeal was universal because his themes were timeless: “The point of the stories wasn’t death,” said the Washington Post, “but the consequences of death revealing history and intention. The crime that chiefly attracted his interest was betrayal of trust—between husbands and wives, between children and parents, sometimes of patients by doctors. It was all set in a California landscape evoked with accuracy and force.” His style set him apart too. As critic Thomas J. Roberts said, “Archer, Macdonald’s narrator, thinks and sees in one-line poems.” Or as Don Pearce put it, “The colors he would dab in are always done with minimal, strong subtlety. It’s like making a drink, you know: just enough lime, a drop or two. Just enough dry vermouth, or you’ll wreck the taste. He knew how to do that to a text; he’s exquisitely subtle. It’s fragrance that he adds, a little bit of exquisite flavor that makes all the difference.”

  He learned from Romantic poets and Victorian novelists as well as hard-boiled writers, and his books were built to last. They could be enjoyed on many levels: as detective stories, family chronicles, regional histories. Donald Davie said, “I don’t reread those books now for the story, I reread them for what they tell me about the California I knew: not just the coast, not just Orange County, not just Palo Alto, but various interesting places—I mean the Central Valley, and the edges of the Mojave. I think they’re wonderful from that point of view.” For some, Macdonald made a lifelong impression with a single sentence. Betty Phelps can still quote: “ ‘A little pale moon hung in a corner of the sky, faint as a thumbprint on a windowpane.’ Once or twice a month my husband and I see it in the sky, and we say, ‘Oh, there’s the little pale moon’—to us that means Ken Millar.”

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  It was as a writer of mystery fiction of course that Macdonald would be best remembered. In that field, he became sui generis. Symons wrote, “With him a particular kind of crime story ended.” But a profusion of new sorts began, and Macdonald seemed to have influenced most of them, either directly or as a standard of excellence.

  Joseph Hansen bristled at the “weak-willed middle-aged little-theater types” in The Drowning Pool, but its author was one of those who spurred him to write his own detective books, he said: “Not until I chanced on Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, did it occur to me that writing a mystery might, after all, be a fine thing to do. These men were real writers.” Hansen�
�s homosexual investigator Dave Brandstetter opened the door for a host of other writers’ gay and lesbian sleuths.

  Women started writing books about female private eyes in the 1970s and 1980s, a nearly unprecedented thing in mystery fiction. Macdonald was often their inspiration. Marcia Muller, whose first Sharon McCone book was published in 1977, told Publishers Weekly how she came to the genre: “I picked up a Ross Macdonald mystery and I fell in love with his work. . . . I had finally found the form I wanted to write.” Sara Paretsky, whose V. I. Warshawski debuted in 1982, also read Macdonald (and put his name in one of her books). The best-known woman PI was Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone. Like Millar (whom she met), Grafton lived in Santa Barbara; in tribute to Macdonald she based Millhone in Santa Teresa, the fictionalized Santa Barbara where Archer so often worked.

  The eighties saw crime fiction exploring the psychological and sexual abuse of children, with Jonathan Kellerman’s 1985 Edgar-winning When the Bough Breaks proving a watershed book. Ross Macdonald inspired him to write that novel, says Kellerman, an LA clinical psychologist at the time: “I was driving on Sunset Boulevard, and I saw an antique store going out of business. I stopped in, and they had some used books including The Underground Man. I’d heard of Ross Macdonald, but I had never read him; I hadn’t read mysteries for years. But the jacket notes sounded intriguing, and I bought it for a dime. I loved the way the man wrote. Something clicked. I said, ‘This man’s a great writer, and he’s writing about family psy-chopathology, and that’s something I know from my work.’ Also it gave me a focus on the whole southern California thing, what I call the malignance behind the palm trees: where you have the beautiful weather and ambience but there’s always a sinister evil lurking.” In 1990, Kellerman wrote, “Let’s be honest: Ross Macdonald remains the grandmaster, taking the crime novel to new heights by imbuing it with psychological resonance, complexity of story, and richness of style that remain awe-inspiring. Those of us in his wake owe a debt that can never be paid.”