by Tom Nolan
Other crime writers were equally grateful. Robert B. Parker, author of the popular Spenser series, wrote, “I owe him, as does every one of us who step, albeit less gracefully, to the same drumbeat. For in his craft and his integrity, he made the detective form a vehicle for high seriousness. It was not that others hadn’t tried, it was that he succeeded. . . . Lew Archer is the form.” James Ellroy (who dedicated a 1984 novel “In Memory of KENNETH MILLAR”) told an interviewer, “Ross Macdonald—on an emotional level—for me is the great teacher.” In Spain, Catalan writer Jaume Fuster created detective Lluis Arquer, who owed his very name to Lew Archer. Peer admiration of Macdonald wasn’t confined to private-eye writers. Asked in 1986 to name her favorite mystery authors, England’s P. D. James answered, “Among the Americans, I particularly admire the hard-boiled school. I don’t often reread them—they’re very different books from mine—but I think that Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald in particular—I do like Ross Macdonald—are marvelous writers.”
Kenneth Millar, humble but proud, thought Ross Macdonald’s novels would still be read in a hundred years. It seems certain the books will stay in print into the twenty-first century. One professional dream of Millar’s went unfulfilled: despite films of Blue City, The Three Roads, and The Ferguson Affair, no movie (the entertaining Harper aside) has yet effectively translated Macdonald’s prose to the screen. But in 1996 something happened that might have pleased Millar nearly as much: Santa Monica’s KCRW-FM produced a seven-and-a-half-hour, full-cast adaptation of Sleeping Beauty, heard on many National Public Radio stations. Lew Archer (played by Harris Yulin, the show’s director) was at last brought to decent dramatic life not through movies or television but on radio, the medium that first sparked Millar’s love of popular culture when he was seven years old in Wiarton.
* * *
Margaret Millar remained active after Macdonald’s death, in some ways more active than when Millar was alive. Accompanied by her sister, she took several trips: to New York, to Canada, to England. The first such was in April 1983, two months before her husband died: Margaret went to Manhattan to receive a Grandmaster Award from the Mystery Writers of America. “I don’t know whether I deserve this award,” she said at the Edgar dinner, “but I do know I worked like hell for forty-three years to get it. I wish my husband were here with me right now.”
Maggie moved out of the Hope Ranch house and put it up for sale as soon as Millar was in Cliff View Terrace. “I couldn’t bear to live in the house anymore,” she told writer Ed Gorman. “Any more than I can bear to put on any of the tapes that he made or anything like that, or hear any of the music. I hardly ever play music for that reason. It reminds me of Ken and it makes me just too damn sad.” She moved into a condo apartment in the Bonnymede-Montecito Shores complex near the Coral Casino. (Another irony: Millar and others were chased by a bulldozer while protesting the 1973 development of this site.)
Margaret lunched daily at the Coral Casino, raised a new dog in her apartment, watched Jeopardy nightly with binoculars on a forty-six-inch TV screen (and rooted for the women). She wrote (but didn’t sell) a twenty-seventh book. And she endured what Millar was spared: the 1989 death of their twenty-six-year-old grandson, James, of a drug overdose in Las Vegas, a city Millar hated and always wrote of as evil. It was bleak testament to the power of Millar’s art that this third-generation sorrow seemed like something from a Ross Macdonald story.
Margaret Sturm Millar came from hardy stock: Hen Sturm lived to be ninety-two. Maggie had no intention of sticking around through years of illness, though; she spoke approvingly of “assisted-suicide” activist Jack Kevorkian. Before a scheduled trip to Toronto in 1992 to be honored at the twenty-third Bouchercon, Margaret broke a hip. An earlier operation that removed one lung had put a strain on her heart and weakened it. Margaret Millar died March 26, 1994, at the age of seventy-nine. As with Ken Millar, there was no memorial service, official or unofficial. “I wish other people would get as sensible about funerals and stuff as Ken and I were,” Margaret had told Ed Gorman. “Cremation and ashes and that’s that. No making your friends suffer through a funeral.”
* * *
Denied a memorial service, his friends and admirers remembered Ken Millar in their own ways. The poets (Donald Davie, Reynolds Price, Diane Wakoski) wrote poems. Davie said, “I thought he was a brave man, very brave. I think he had a very curious and unhappy life. Born into an extraordinarily dislocated situation: Californian, lost his father, raised as a poor relation in Canada, then going to Michigan . . . Nah, he’d started with most of the strikes against him. That he managed to put it all together and get steadily better for a long time—I thought it was wonderful. I’m very proud to have known him and to have been his friend, very proud.”
Millar predicted he’d die before Maggie, and in the 1970s he arranged that his cremated ashes would be scattered in the Santa Barbara Channel, “where, in the destructive element immersed, I have spent the best hours of my best days.” He’d always seemed happiest in the sea, where his dog Brandy kept him company. After Brandy’s death, a certain seal waited for Millar each day and swam with him. The Pacific was the one constant in his life, Ken Millar said: the ocean at Santa Barbara was the same ocean his father had taken him sailing on in Vancouver. He swam in that sea even after his memory went, and the sea took his ashes. “In the end as in the beginning,” Robert Easton wrote, “the victim was Ken.” And the hero.
* * *
* * *
* * *
Afterword
“Biographers should write about figures they love,” Ross Macdonald observed to Eudora Welty, “or at least warmly hate.”1
Macdonald (born Kenneth Millar, of course) was confident that books would in time be written about him—just as he was certain his novels would still be read a century after his death. And, with his PhD in English criticism and his lifelong devotion to serious reading, he seemed to feel that all’s fair in love and biography.
“Ken indicated to me many times,” wrote his friend Jerre Lloyd, “that he knew anything that had happened to him would, of necessity, have to be eventually included in any biography that was ever done.”2
He didn’t seem too concerned about past failings or discouraging deeds that future scribes might discover about Millar/Macdonald—so long as such investigators were animated by at least a few degrees of warmth. “The more truth we learn about a man,” he wrote his colleague, the scholar and biographer Matt Bruccoli, “no matter how damaging in a sense, the better we can love him.”3
Ken Millar himself was especially interested in learning about, appreciating, and forgiving writers, whom he regarded as being among the most important figures in any civilization. “The heroes that I admire,” he told journalist Paul Nelson, “are artists and intellectuals.” He went on to say: “Almost the greatest pleasure I have in life is drawing the relationship between fiction and reality” in the lives of authors he valued, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dashiell Hammett.4
It was stimulating and illuminating for him, he said, to relate a writer’s own history to those of his made-up characters. But it posed a special challenge, he thought, when dealing with authors working in his own detective-fiction genre: “It seems to me that there must be some sort of psychological doubleness in anybody who chooses to write mystery novels in preference to straight novels.”5
Being such a novelist (and being married to another), he knew whereof he spoke.
“I can think of few more complex enterprises,” Macdonald said to some five hundred literary scholars gathered in Chicago’s Palmer House in 1973 in celebration of his career, “than disentangling the mind and life of a first-person detective-story writer from the mask of his detective-narrator.”6
Millar said more than once that he used the detective form and the persona of his detective Lew Archer—not to mention the pseudonym of Ross Macdonald—to place a sort of welder’s mask between himself and what real-life material he manipulate
d into fiction: hazardous matter that would otherwise be too hot, emotionally speaking, for him to handle.
In dealing with journalists, he was circumspect: prevailing upon them, when necessary, to keep potentially scandalous matters (of which his life contained a small but significant share, mostly involving his daughter, Linda) out of Macdonald interviews and feature stories. With friends, he was even less forthcoming: ambiguous, taciturn, and prone to prolonged and (for some) uncomfortable silences.
To Jerre Lloyd, a regular attendee during the 1960s of the twice-monthly Santa Barbara writers’ lunch Millar cofounded and a frequent visitor to the Millars’ home, Ken was “fascinating and incomprehensible . . . a man whose combination of brilliance and internal conflicts made him so enigmatic that most people, even after knowing him for years, could scarcely understand him at all.”7
Such was the daunting and secretive figure whom I began to write a biography of in 1990.
Millar/Macdonald died in 1983. My interest in him began much earlier: in 1959, when I was eleven, and Linda Millar disappeared from her UC Davis campus, causing a well-publicized (at Millar’s insistence) “missing coed” hunt up and down the state. The search for the mystery writers’ daughter was front-page news for the entire time she was gone. Reacting to an inaccurate tip that Linda had been seen in my hometown of Hollywood, Ken (a Santa Barbara resident) came to Los Angeles to coordinate his search with the L.A. police. The Millar family’s story was all over the newspapers, radio, and television. Local broadcasts were interrupted one afternoon for a statewide televised appeal by Ken Millar. Even in a time and a town that fed on sensationalism, this all seemed amazing. Perhaps it was the conjunction of fact and fiction: the detective-novelist caught up in a true-life mystery as puzzling and urgent as those in his own books, but one with a happy ending: after eight days, Linda was found, safe, in Reno, Nevada, by private detectives Ken Millar had hired.
In the midst of the Millars’ public crisis, I came upon a paperback of Macdonald’s in a drugstore rack; it featured a full-length silhouette photograph of the author, in trench coat and fedora, puffing on a cigarette like a film-noir private eye. Not long after, I started reading Ross Macdonald’s novels, as I’d already begun reading Raymond Chandler’s and Dashiell Hammett’s. This trio’s works gripped me as much as the books of other American fiction writers I discovered in those years: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Lardner.
My craving for Macdonald’s fiction increased as my appreciation for its poetic style and emotional content grew. Macdonald gave you so much more than most of his genre colleagues: insight, elegant prose, overall brilliance.
My interest in Millar, the man behind Macdonald, also grew as I met certain folks who’d encountered him in person: a couple of television production people who’d worked with him and his wife, Margaret Millar, in the late 1950s; the lawyer-father of the youngest defendant in the Santa Barbara bank-burning trial of 1970, which, the lawyer said, Ken Millar attended daily. These jolting coincidences—unexpected splicings of the fictional with real life—had a strong effect, “connecting” me, in my mind at least, to the writer whose books I returned to over and over.
By the early 1970s, Macdonald was a bestselling author, his books on the New York Times top-ten list alongside those of mainstream novelists such as Vonnegut, Roth, and Nabokov.
When Ross Macdonald died, he left a noticeable gap in California’s literary culture. When Ken Millar died, I yearned to know more about the man whose sensibility shaped those novels I’d read so compulsively. “Someone should write a book about him,” I said. A friend responded, “You should.”
It took ten years. Many people in several states and three countries gave me assistance. Dozens of institutions provided relevant documents; hundreds of people (including Ken Millar’s widow, Margaret) agreed to be interviewed. Eventually, some fifty legal-size cartons of photocopies and printouts filled the better part of two rooms in my house.
Despite all the research, certain mysteries remained.
For instance: Whatever happened to 1963?
Every other year of Macdonald’s career generated business correspondence, the originals or copies of which were held in accessible archives: his literary agency’s, at Princeton; his publisher’s, at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin; and his own papers, at UC Irvine. But no such business letters from or to Macdonald in the year 1963 were found in any of the expected places. It was strange. The gap was complete, from January through December; and the archived correspondence resumed promptly, at all three archives, on January 1, 1964.
Such an absence in one collection alone would be puzzling. But three? What was the cause? Nineteen sixty-three had been an ordinary enough year, with no known controversy or legal contention; and as such, it no doubt generated the usual exchange of messages between author, agent, and publisher.
Inquiries were made to all concerned parties: Where were those letters? No one knew. The mystery remained unsolved.
Other frustrations came postpublication of Ross Macdonald: A Biography (Scribner) in 1999. This biographer had the quixotic hope that his book might put an end to the all-too-common misspelling of Ross Macdonald’s last name (usually as “MacDonald,” but even sometimes “McDonald”). Far from it. The more people discuss Macdonald, it seems, the more they misspell his name. As the “enigmatic” Kenneth Millar’s pseudonymous work survived his death, his pen name, alas, had also acquired a semi-pseudonym.
But the new century saw more heartening developments in regards to Macdonald’s writing. Contrary to persistent rumors, all Ross Macdonald’s novels are once more back in print, in handsome trade-paper editions. And 2015, the centenary of Ken Millar’s birth, saw the entry of Macdonald’s fiction into the prestigious Library of America, with Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s, the first of three Macdonald volumes promised by the closest entity this country has to an official literary canon.
Also to be published in 2015 was Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald (Arcade), coedited by this writer and Suzanne Marrs (Miss Welty’s biographer), an epistolary treasure that sheds light on an extraordinary friendship.
Ross Macdonald’s literary reputation has held strong and grown stronger since his death, with a new generation of authors expressing admiration for his achievement.
Bestselling novelist Michael Chabon, recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, told cultural critic Scott Timberg: “Ross Macdonald is the paradigm, to me, of a writer who never wrote outside the so-called ‘confines’ of his genre yet who expanded those boundaries so far in terms of language, characterization, and literary patterning that it makes no sense to talk of confines at all. He just wrote great novels.”8 Jonathan Lethem, another highly regarded and bestselling modern novelist, said to Timberg: “Ross Macdonald is hard-boiled detective writing’s great formalist. He took Chandler’s quirks and intuitions and turned them into a set of incisive instruments for making his great, decades-long dissection of the culture of postwar Southern California—not only its underside but its topside, too.”9
Timberg himself contended that Macdonald, between the lines of the Archer books, wrote “some of the best social history of the post [–World War II] period.”10
The UK’s Tobias Jones judged that “Macdonald outgrew his literary predecessors [Chandler and Hammett] and surpassed them . . . to plumb the metaphysical depths,” employing “an often startling poetic imagery, writing lines that can remain with you for a lifetime.”11
Irish crime novelist John Connolly, in 2012, supposed Macdonald to be “the first great psychological novelist that the genre produced,” as well as “the genre’s first great poet of empathy and compassion.”12 Donna Leon, author of an internationally popular series of books with the Italian police detective Guido Brunetti, praised Ross Macdonald as her favorite mystery writer: “Macdonald’s prose is wonderful, his sentences are sometimes serpentine, sometimes as balanced as anything Alexand
er Pope wrote.”13
The publication of Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s by the Library of America, one hundred years after the author’s birth and thirty-two years after his death, prompted several especially thoughtful appraisals of a life’s work, which looked even more impressive to twenty-first-century critics.
Fredric Koeppel wrote: “Ross Macdonald is often seen as the heir of Hammett and Chandler, but Macdonald went far beyond [them] in his exploration of human psychology and motivations. . . . It is not too large a claim to elevate Ross Macdonald . . . to the ranks of Joan Didion and Nathanael West as a transcriber of Southern California’s angst, ennui, and tawdry glamour.”14
Maureen Corrigan, book critic for National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, made the case for Macdonald’s fiction as well as anyone: “You should read Macdonald for the reason you read any great writer—for the thrill of the language and vision. . . . Macdonald’s encompassing awareness distinguishes his writing: he gives us the good, the bad, and the ugly—all the stuff that makes us human beings tick.” 15