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Ross Macdonald

kevinburtonsmith

Pseudonym of Ken Millar
(1915-83)

“No once since Macdonald has written with such poetic inevitability about people, their secret cares, their emotional scars, their sadness, cowardice, and courage. He reminded the rest of us of what was possible in our genre.”
— John Lutz, in January Magazine

“We’re all guilty”
— Lew Archer, in The Blue Hammer

Kenneth Millar, under the pen name of Ross Macdonald, arguably forms the third point of what is now considered the Holy Trinity of hardboiled detective fiction, the other points being, of course, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and is, to many, the most critically and academically respected of the three.

Although born in Los Gatos, California, December 13th, 1915, he was raised and educated in Canada by his mother, a never particularly healthy woman, and a succession of relatives, after she and his father, a sometime sailor/poet/writer, separated. “I counted the number of rooms I had lived in during my first sixteen years, and got a total of fifty,” he has written. This rootlessness, and the hole left by an absent parent, was to become a recurring motif in Millar’s fiction.

He attended boarding schools, and in 1938, he took a break from his studies at the University of Western Ontario to travel for a year in Europe, including a visit to Nazi Germany. He returned to Canada, married Margaret Sturm, and acquired advanced degrees and a Phi Beta Kappa key at the University of Michigan. He began to teach and, inspired by his wife’s success as a writer (yes, she was that Margaret Millar), he began to write, tentatively at first. In 1939, their daughter, Linda, was born.

And then World War II, came along. Perhaps unconciouslessly following in his seaman father’s footsteps, Millar served as communications officer aboard an escort carrier in the Pacific with the American navy. Stationed in California, Margaret went down to visit him in 1946, and the couple decided to stay on. They lived in Santa Barbara for the rest of their lives. At this point, Millar had gone full circle, returning to his birthplace, with a family once more.

Life was good, or at least appeared to be. Millar finished his doctoral dissertation, “The Inward Eye : A Revaluation of Coleridge’s Psychological Criticism,” at the University of Michigan, and received his PhD, and both he (under the pen name of first John Macdonald, then John Ross Macdonld and finally Ross Macdonald) and Margaret were regularly being published. Millar had at first tried his hand spy novels and thrillers, but soon settled on a new series, featuring private detective Lew Archer, beginning with 1949’s The Moving Target.

Originally, Archer was clearly modeled on Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. But as the series evolved, Macdonald began to do he did his own thing.

Macdonald’s own past would not be denied–it lurked, waiting to pounce. His own family life was less than ideal–there were difficulties in the marriage, and Linda was a troubled child. Therapy helped, and 1959’s novel, The Galton Case, became a watershed, both personally and artistically, in Millar’s life. Archer’s (and Millar’s) obsession with the twisted, secret history of families, and how the sins of the past shape the present, were finally nailed down, for all who cared to see. Although the early Archer’s were well-written and tightly plotted, The Galton Case really got down to business. From that point on, it has been noted, Macdonald wrote the same story over and over, endless variations on the same themes of lost and abandoned children, absent parents, family secrets denied. In the hands of a lesser writer, this would amount to hack work, perhaps. But not in Macdonald’s hands. Archer may have become a conduit for other people’s stories, but they were great, messy, complicated stories.

As Tyler Sage of The Times Literary Supplement noted:

One of the achievements of Ross Mac­donald (the pen name of Kenneth Millar) was to take this set of concerns (of the traditional hard-boiled novel) and turn it inward. Macdonald wrote about wealth and poverty, ambition and deception, the vacuity of Southern California culture. But his deepest obsession was with the horrors of family life and the way those horrors form us when we are young

In 1969, a favorable front page review in The New York Times Book Review by William Goldman of Millar’s latest Archer novel, The Goodbye Look, followed by an interview by John Leonard, finally brought him the critical attention he had always felt was his due, and certainly the critical respect his reputation was jump-started. But his popularity (he supposedly sold a whole hell of a lot of books–one article I read recently mentioned “Stephen King-like sales”) must be based on more than a few pieces in the NYTBR.

In fact, as contributor Jim Doherty points out:

“…although the articles referred to did seem to confirm Macdonald’s status , they were not the beginning of his being thought of as the “Holy Ghost” to Hammett’s “Father” and Chandler’s “Son.” If there is any one critic who put Macdonald in that august company, it was Anthony Boucher, who once said that, without in the least diminishing his admiration for Hammett and Chandler, he believed that Macdonald was the best writer of the three. I believe he said that in the early ’60s. Certainly, critics started using the phrase “in the tradition of Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald” as early as the ’60s. The fact that Knopf was the publisher of all three also lent some gravitas to Macdonald, as did the fact that Hammett’s first PI novel appeared in ’29, Chandler’s in ’39, and Macdonald’s in ’49 made it seem like a natural development in the PI novel was taking place.

While Macdonald may not have been perceived as the equal of Hammett and Chandler as early as the ’50s, he was certainly the most critically acclaimed PI writer of that decade. Michael Avallone (RIP) was the one who coined the “Father, Son, & Holy Ghost” quip to describe Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald, again, I beleive, in the early ’60s. The critical and commercial success of the film Harper, based on Macdonald’s first novel The Moving Target, in ’66 added to his luster. All this predates the articles in Newsweek and the NY Time Book Review. These really were the culmination of a long process of critical acclaim that greeted Macdonald almost from the first.”

Were all those fans taken in? For a lot of people, the Lew Archer books are a literary touchstone in their lives, and certainly in mine. I read one, on the recommendation of a friend, and I had soon devoured every one I could find. And at the time I knew nothing of Macdonald’s critical rep, other than a few scattered cover blurbs.

Certainly, some of the puffery about Macdonald, particularly by Macdonald himself, is hard to swallow. And not all the books are that strong. Then again, he wrote lots of books, more than Hammett and Chandler combined. And he did take the crime novel in directions it had never really gone before, and sold a lot of books doing it.

Archer was perhaps the first of the compassionate eyes to truly make a mark, and ushered in a whole new psychological depth to the hard-boiled detective story. Millar’s other interests included conservation and politics. He charted the fascinating and ever-evolving society of his native state, although his main thrust would be the twisted and hidden secrets of the human heart, the hidden truths that dog victim and murderer alike. And in the long run, he’s remained a strong influence on the hard-boiled genre, like it or not.

Not that Macdonald himself was all that hard-boiled. It may have been “Archer’s tough, world-weary voice that anchored that brilliant series of detective novels,” as Richard Russo wrote in The Destiny Thief (2018), “but Ken Millar was no wise-cracking tough guy.” He was well-educated, intellectual and sensitive, a bookish man and a birdwatcher

Certainly you can see traces of Archer’s, uh, underlying gentle decency (or bleeding heart weenie-ness, depending on your point of view) in the work of Robert Parker, Robert Crais, Michael Collins, Bill Pronzini, Sue Grafton, Joseph Hansen, Jonathan Valin , George Pelecanos and Stephen Greenleaf, among countless others. Someone must have actually read the books, and not just a few newspaper pieces.

Macdonald served as president of The Mystery Writers of America inj 1965, received the Silver Dagger in 1964 and the Gold Dagger in 1965 from The British Crime Writers Association, and in 1981, received The Eye, the Lifetime Achievement Award from The Private Eye Writers of America. Strangely, Macdonald was never honoured with an Edgar for any of his novels, although Margaret received one in 1955 for Beast in View. But in 1974, Macdonald finally won the Mystery Writers of America’s Grandmaster Award.

He died on July 11, 1983, of Alzheimer’s disease; a tragic irony, given that it was the past and the memories of it that drove his finest work. But he left behind a body of work that has forever left its mark on detective fiction.

The Archer novels ask us to not so much solve the mysteries of our own lives, but more importantly, perhaps, to try to understand them.

UNDER OATH

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Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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