Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  Macdonald, or Kenneth Millar to give him his true name, was an interesting, conflicted man. He was born in California but raised in Canada. In the wake of his father’s abandonment of the family, he lived an itinerant, almost Dickensian existence with his mother. He became a tearaway in his youth and was lucky not to spend his postteen years in prison. His background gave him an insight into the problems faced by the young in their formative years, and his books are strewn with troubled children, often seeking, or haunted by, parental figures who have failed them or, as with Macdonald himself, who have abandoned them entirely.

  He married Margaret Sturm in 1938 (she herself, as Margaret Millar, was a fine mystery novelist in her own right, and is dealt with by Declan Hughes elsewhere in this volume). In the course of a sometimes difficult, thorny marriage they had one daughter, Linda. In 1956, Linda Millar killed a young Mexican in a drunk-driving incident, striking him so hard that she drove him through the windshield of a parked car. On the advice of counsel, both Macdonald and his daughter (who was heavily sedated for the trial) refused to testify. It may have been the response of a panicked parent, but it was also an act of moral cowardice on Macdonald’s part. I’m speculating here, but given the nature of Macdonald’s writing, and its intense compassion for children, I can’t help but feel that Macdonald must have looked back with a degree of shame on his behavior during the trial. He might well have been trying to protect his own child, but in the course of doing so he forgot about the other child in the case, the dead child. I wonder how often the image of that boy came back to haunt him.

  Three years later, Linda disappeared from her college dorm, setting off a massive police hunt and leading Macdonald to court the media in an effort to ensure her safe return. She was finally found in Reno, Nevada, and was admitted to psychiatric care. Eventually, Linda married and gave birth to a son, James. She died of a “cerebral incident” in 1970, and her son James subsequently died of a drug overdose, although Macdonald himself was in the grave by then.

  All of this is important because it is hard to separate Macdonald’s work from his life. The books allowed him a certain psychological distance from his own difficulties, but there is always the sense that he was using Archer as a means of refracting his personal experiences. (When I talk to writing groups—which is rarely, as I’m not sure that I understand very much about the process of writing at all, at least where it concerns my own work—I tend to tell them that fiction is not reflective but refractive by nature: it takes human experience and allows us to see its constituent parts broken down and examined in new and unfamiliar ways. If that’s true, then central characters like Lew Archer or, indeed, my own Charlie Parker, function as prisms.)

  And Macdonald practiced much of what he preached: he engaged in environmental activism—the relationship between man and his environment being a significant theme in his later books, including The Underground Man (1971) and Sleeping Beauty (1973)—long before it was fashionable to do so, and when the singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, a big mystery fan who adored Macdonald’s work but had met his idol only once, was in danger of killing himself through drug abuse, it was Macdonald who appeared on his doorstep to intervene. In acknowledgment of Macdonald’s solicitude, the dedication on Zevon’s 1980 album Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School reads “For Kenneth Millar, mi migliore fabbro.” Zevon apparently quoted one of Archer’s own lines from The Doomsters back to Macdonald when he arrived: “It was one of those times when you have to decide between your own inconvenience and the unknown quality of another man’s troubles.” Years later, Zevon commented of Macdonald that “he meant that stuff. Obviously. He was that guy.”

  The first full-length Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target, was published in 1949, but it would be fair to say that Macdonald initially viewed his mystery novels as a way to earn money and be in print while he prepared to write a more literary novel about familial strife. It was probably only with the publication of The Galton Case in 1959 that Macdonald realized the Archer novels would enable him to pursue the themes of familial conflict that interested him the most, and were thus destined to be the body of work upon which his reputation would rest.

  Opinions differ on which of Macdonald’s novels is the greatest. The Galton Case is frequently named, but it’s a difficult, overcomplicated book, I think. Although a crucial turning point in Macdonald’s writing, it lacks the elegance of his most accomplished work. For me, The Chill (1963) is Macdonald’s crowning glory, a novel that represents the quintessence of his thematic concerns while also functioning as a sleek, near-perfect thriller with one of the genre’s greatest endings.

  Macdonald described The Chill as having “my most horrible plot yet.” It is, in many ways, an angry, uncanny, profoundly gothic book into which he channeled his unhappiness at the time: disappointment at his best friend’s divorce, his inability to get his book on Coleridge published, his dissatisfaction with academia, and his hurt at comments made about him by Raymond Chandler. In fact, on one level the book can be read as a sly, extended dig at Chandler.

  Chandler’s presence has obscured Macdonald’s posthumous reputation in much the same way that it did while he was alive. Chandler, the older writer, clearly saw Macdonald as a rival, and did his very best to belittle the younger novelist whenever possible, not recognizing that Macdonald was part of a progression, drawing on Chandler to create something new and move the genre forward, just as Chandler had earlier drawn on Hammett. After Chandler’s death, Macdonald became aware of letters against him that Chandler had written, including one to James Sandoe, published as part of Raymond Chandler Speaking, which described Macdonald as a “literary eunuch” and criticized the “pretentiousness” of his phrasing. This has tended to be the default mode of criticism where Macdonald is concerned, a reaction, perhaps, to a certain reticence and poise in his writing, a distrust of the kind of excessive literary or stylistic distractions that inferior writers in the genre sometimes use to disguise the emptiness of their work.

  It’s unlikely that Chandler would have been quite so vituperative had he not felt threatened both by Macdonald’s writing and the critical acclaim that he was receiving. Macdonald, in turn, landed a couple of good punches of his own, remarking that Chandler lacked “tragic unity” and believed “a good plot was one that made for good scenes, as if the parts were greater than the whole.”

  In the end, I would argue that Macdonald was the better novelist of the two, and certainly the better plotter. Chandler’s rather haphazard approach to plotting is generally excused on the basis that he was more interested in character than plot, but this is to ignore the fact that it is not an either/or relationship between the two elements. If they are both handled properly, then plot should come out of character. Or, as Macdonald once said: “I see plot as a vehicle for meaning.”

  Originally entitled A Mess of Shadows, from a line in the W. B. Yeats poem “Among School Children,” The Chill takes some of its structure and imagery from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: a sad story told by a character seeking release and deliverance; a mist-shrouded environment; and the death of a bird, in this case a pigeon rather than an albatross, although the latter gets a nod when a photographer’s camera is described as hanging from his neck “like an albatross.”

  Like all of Macdonald’s work, it is a novel obsessed with the impact of the past upon the present. As Archer tells Mrs. Hoffman, “History is always connected to the present.” Again and again, we are reminded of the resonance of old acts. Dr. Godwin’s voice is “like the whispering ghost of the past.” In catching a glimpse of himself, Archer thinks that he looks like “a ghost from the present haunting a bloody moment in the past.” And, in a wonderful image, Archer describes the questions raised by Mrs. Delaney as sticking “in my mind like fishhooks which trailed their broken lines into the past.”

  Earlier, I described The Chill as “near-perfect,” although it implies that Macdonald erred in some way in the book’s creation, and I don’t think
that’s true. Its imperfections—no, better to call them “complications,” the word used in the clockmaker’s art to refer to features beyond the basic requirements of display—are deliberate, a testament to Macdonald’s courage as a writer and his absolute refusal to fall back on sentimentality. While Alex Kincaid, the man whose missing bride sparks the story, is another of Macdonald’s troubled youths, tainted by the actions of an earlier generation, he is also something of a jerk, and it’s difficult to feel a great deal of sympathy for him. By contrast, Macdonald kills off one of the book’s most attractive characters disturbingly early, and in doing so accentuates the horror of the murderous, semimythic female figure that stalks the novel and gives it the power of nightmare.

  Arguably, Macdonald is the first great psychological novelist that the genre produced. While Chandler tends to look for sociological explanations, Macdonald instead looks inward at the dynamics of families, and in particular the wrongs done to children, the sins of the fathers (or mothers) that are visited on the sons (or daughters). In this sense, The Chill falls into a group of Macdonald’s books that touch upon Oedipal dread. Macdonald described his first experience of therapy as a defining moment for him, and on one level his novels can be viewed as a series of extended Freudian meditations.

  And then there is Lew Archer himself. He remains one of the most enigmatic of detectives. Throughout the series we learn almost nothing about his past, apart from the fact that he was once married, which gives him a sense of loneliness and dislocation. We are offered few, if any, of the little day-to-day details of his existence that have become the stock-in-trade of the modern detective hero: no cute sidekicks, no dogs, no quirky tastes in opera or fast cars. For Macdonald, such elements would have served only as a distraction from the central fact of Archer’s existence: he is a profoundly moral being, with an almost limitless capacity for pity and empathy. He is neither as tough, nor as cynical, as Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. In The Barbarous Coast (1956), Archer notes: “The problem was to love people, to serve them, without wanting anything from them.” It is an extraordinary statement of intent, perhaps even more so now than it was over fifty years ago. In many ways, the society that he inhabits is unworthy of Archer, although he never sees himself in those terms. He is not self-interested. Instead, his interest is directed at the lives of others in an attempt both to understand their actions and undo the harm that has been done to them. His innate goodness may explain some of the hostility that has been directed toward him by critics and writers who mistake cynicism for realism, and confuse sentimentality with genuine emotion.

  Macdonald died of Alzheimer’s disease in 1983. One of the most moving moments in Tom Nolan’s excellent biography of the writer sees Macdonald, his mind failing, struggling to use his typewriter, and being able to type only the word “broken” over and over again. Read The Chill, then read the rest of Macdonald’s books. We will not see the likes of him again.

  John Connolly was born in Dublin in 1968. He is the author of sixteen books, including The Book of Lost Things, Nocturnes, the Samuel Johnson books for younger readers, and the Charlie Parker series of mystery novels, the latest of which is The Wrath of Angels. Like most writers, he is waiting to be found out. Visit him online at www.johnconnollybooks.com.

  Pop. 1280

  by Jim Thompson (1964)

  JO NESBØ

  (essay translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson)

  * * *

  Dubbed the “Dimestore Dostoevsky” by novelist Geoffrey O’Brien, Jim Thompson (1906–77) published more than thirty novels during his career. Despite early critical praise, and particularly positive reviews from Anthony Boucher in the New York Times, Thompson’s talent went largely unrecognized during his lifetime. He made his debut in 1942 with Now and On Earth, and is best known for novels such as The Killer Inside Me (1952), Savage Night (1953), A Hell of a Woman (1954), The Getaway (1958), and The Grifters (1963), all of which were characteristic of an oeuvre that unflinchingly explored the darkest and nastiest recesses of the human psyche. “He let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it,” declared Stephen King. Well served by film adaptations, and particularly French filmmakers, Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me was remade in 2010, directed by Michael Winterbottom and starring Casey Affleck.

  * * *

  There’s a clip in the Sylvester Stallone film Cop Land. The clip only lasts about one or two seconds, and doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the film. It’s a brief flash of a sign showing the number of inhabitants in the town. The sign says, “Pop. 1280.”

  I looked around the cinema when it came on the screen, and listened. No reaction. Obviously. Because it was 1997 and this was a coded message for the initiated few, a bonus for those who had dived into the deepest depths of pulp literature and found Jim Thompson, the genius who portrayed the American psychopath in the first person some forty years before Brett Easton Ellis did the same in American Psycho.

  I personally hadn’t had to dive so deep myself. I was served Jim Thompson on a silver platter by a friend, Espen, who told me it was “old, but good stuff.” The book had the very promising title of Pop. 1280 and a not-quite-so-promising sheriff on the cover. And maybe that was the only way to discover Jim Thompson: you had to be guided to him by someone like Espen, someone who moved freely beyond the main highways and narrow paths of literary snobbery.

  Because Jim Thompson is not to be found in any best-seller list or serious literary publication; he was neither the talk of the town nor a cult phenomenon. Jim Thompson died in 1977, but by then, in a way, he had already been dead a long time. Written off, labeled as a mediocre crime writer who, by the end of his seventy-year life, had destroyed any credibility he might still have enjoyed by writing bad books with one aim in mind: to give the readers what he thought they wanted, so that he could earn enough money to cover his rent, medical expenses, and alcohol consumption. He had betrayed his own talent and his real fans, and undermined any possibility of ever being taken seriously again. There weren’t many who saw a reason to go to Jim Thompson’s funeral. Fewer still actually turned up, due to a printing error in his death notice. It was like the final chapter of a Jim Thompson novel.

  Then in 1984, Black Lizard Press started to print Jim Thompson again. And it was one of these paperbacks that Espen gave me.

  I read. Opened my eyes. And understood.

  I then proceeded to read the rest of Thompson’s work—not every single line and page, but the best and most important books, because I quickly learned that it was necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. At his best, Jim Thompson was fantastic. At his worst, he was therefore all the more remarkably bad. How could the author who had written Savage Night, Hell of a Woman, and The Grifters also write The Rip-Off? (Given the limited attention that Jim Thompson has received in Norway, it is unbelievable that this particular book has been translated into Norwegian [Bløffen, published by Cappelen], but read it and compare it to the rest if you want to see just how much an author’s production can vary, in terms of quality!)

  The answer lies possibly in Jim Thompson’s desperate consumption of alcohol and the associated deterioration in his health. For here was a candle that burned at both ends, and—I’m taking a chance here as Jim Thompson never denied himself a dodgy metaphor—that is precisely why it burned so bright. So brightly, in fact, that between 1952 and 1954, in the space of just eighteen months, he wrote twelve novels, including some of his very best. Following this eruption of creativity, the gaps between each book, and between the high points in his writing, got longer, whereas the periods between his excessive drinking and his stints in the hospital grew shorter. Pop. 1280, which he wrote in 1964, was his last great work. He returned to the figure of the bad sheriff (Nick Corey), the same figure with which he started out in 1952 when he introduced Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me.

  And after that, it was over: the decline had started, before he ever managed to become the Raymond Chandle
r or Dashiell Hammett that he could have been. And yet, on his deathbed, he said to his wife: “Just wait, I’ll be famous within ten years of my death.” I think we can answer that statement with Sheriff Nick Corey’s mantra: “I wouldn’t say you was wrong, but I sure wouldn’t say you was right, either.”

  But in my book, Jim Thompson is still the greatest crime writer. And so I can only say to you what Espen said to me back then when he handed me that copy of Pop. 1280: “I envy you, because you still haven’t read this.”

  Jo Nesbø is a Norwegian author best known for his police procedurals featuring Detective Harry Hole. He made his debut in 1997 with Flaggermusmannen (The Bat), although the first of his novels to be translated into English was Marekors (2003), published in translation as The Devil’s Star (2005). In total there are nine Harry Hole novels, the most recent of which is Phantom (2012). A film adapted from his stand-alone novel Hodejegerne (2008), aka Headhunters (2011), was released in 2012. Nesbø has won a slew of literary prizes in Scandinavia, including Best Norwegian Crime Novel Ever Written for The Redbreast in 2004.

  Roseanna

  by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (1965)

  QIU XIAOLONG

  * * *

  Maj Sjöwall (b. 1935) and Per Wahlöö (1926–75) were a Swedish writing couple—lovers as well as coauthors. They are widely regarded as the godparents of modern Scandinavian crime fiction, but their sequence of ten novels featuring Detective (later Inspector) Martin Beck of Stockholm’s National Homicide Department has influenced generations of mystery writers worldwide. Sometimes slow moving, often witty and tender, always engrossing, the Beck novels are unabashed socialist critiques of Swedish society contained within the framework of the mystery genre. “We realised that people read crime and through the stories we could show the reader that under the official image of welfare-state Sweden there was another layer of poverty, criminality and brutality,” Sjöwall said in a 2009 interview with the Guardian newspaper in Britain, a statement of intent that might equally have been echoed by the late Stieg Larsson, creator of the Millennium Trilogy. “We wanted to show where Sweden was heading: towards a capitalistic, cold and inhuman society, where the rich got richer, the poor got poorer.” They planned ten books, and ten books only, taking turns to write alternate chapters. Wahlöö died shortly before the publication of the final Beck book, The Terrorists.