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Ross Macdonald (1915-1983) - Pseudonym for Kenneth Millar |
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One of the few mystery writers also regarded as a major American novelist. Ross Macdonald was frequently characterized as the successor to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. After writing four novels under his real name, Kenneth Millar, Macdonald turned out his first private-eye novel in 1949. He published the book under the name John Macdonald so as to avoid confusion with his wife, Margaret Millar, who was writing mysteries under her own name. Later he changed his name to John Ross Macdonald to avoid confusion with John D. MacDonald. Finally he dropped the first name, and was known as Ross Macdonald. "Though Archer defines himself as a Natty Bumpo, "a great tracker" (The Zebra-Striped Hearse), he seems less interested in trapping than understanding his quarry. His constant speculations, sometimes self-contradictory within a single book, on coincidence, fate, and the causes of crime reveal the depth of his intelligence, whatever its source in experience or book learning. His frequent awakening by early morning birds attests to harmony with the natural cycle that almost balances the horrors he witnesses. Few possessors of a University of Michigan Ph.D. in literature (earned in 1951) have demonstrated their learning as artfully as Macdonald." ('Lew Archer as Culture Maven' by Burton Kendle, in The Big Book of Noir, edited by Lee Server, Ed Gorman, Martin H. Greenberg, Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1998, pp. 249-250) Ross Macdonald's famous private detective is Lew Archer, name
having been lifted from Dashiell Hammett's
novel Maltese Falcon (detective Miles Archer) according to some sources;
but from his sign of the zodiac, Sagittarius, according to the author.
Archer is a low-key figure who observes the action from sidelines.
He was the protagonist of eighteen novels and a handful of short stories. Lew Archer was born on June 2, 1914 (in some sources 1913). In The Galton Case (1959) Archer says he played high school football. He was a Long Beach detective sergeant, and during World War II he worked in the intelligence and fought on Okinawa. Archer is divorced. Until 1969, he avoided involvement with women he met on cases, but in The Blue Hammer (1976), where Archer was in his sixties, he was ready for a long term relationship. Archer's interests include Japanese art, good books, classical music, and nature. Lives in Los Angeles and he hates its smog. His cases takes him frequently to Santa Teresa. - Millar's other series character, Chet Gordon, appeared in novels The Dark Tunnel (1944), based on Millar's travels in Nazi Germany, Trouble Follows Me (1946), Blue City (1947), and The Three Roads (1948). Kenneth Millar was born in Los Gatos, California - thus he was an American citizen by birth, although he was brought to his parents' native Canada as young child. His father, John M. Millar, was a newspaper editor and Scots dialect poet. Millar was raised by his mother, Annie Millar, after his father left the family without warning. Annie had worked previously as a nurse, but due to typhoid fever she could not take care alone of her son, and moved with him from one relative to another. For some time he lived with his aunt in Medicine Hat, Alberta.Annie's father was a village storekeeper, descended from several generations of Pennsylvania Dutch farmers. Poverty and awareness of class distinctions after the breakup of his parents' marriage defined Millar's early years and he returned to his depressing childhood in later works: "But for every air-conditioned ranchhouse with its swimming pool and private landing strip, there are dozens of tin-sided shacks and broken down trailers where the lost tribes of the migrant workers live. And when you leave the irrigated areas you find yourself in gray desert where nobody lives at all." (The Wycherly Woman, Bantam Books, 1984, p. 1; originally published in 1961) At the age of eleven, Millar began to write stories and poems. He
visited the library regularly. While studying in the Kitchener-Waterloo
Collegiate and Vocational School Millar found the works of Dostoyevsky,
Coleridge and Wilkie Collins. His first printed story was a parody of
Sherlock Holmes. An ambitious plan was to complete Coleridge's
unfinished poem, 'Christabel.' After graduating Millar worked for a year on a farm. His father died in 1932 and left him a $2,500 insurance policy, which enabled him to continue his studies. In 1933 he entered the University of Western Ontario. His mother died in 1935. Millar spent two semesters in 1936-1937 in Western Europe. The next day after his graduation in June 1938, he married Margaret Sturm, his fellow student in the Kitchener (Ontario) high school. She would start a career in writing under the name Margaret Millar. Between 1938 and 1939 Millar studied at the University of Toronto, and continued his studies
at the University of Michigan, where he was also a teacher. The English poet W. H. Auden,
who was there at that time a visiting professor, encouraged him to
regard detective novels as a legitimate literary form. Millar earned his Ph.D. in 1951, with a dissertation on Samuel Taylor Coleridge. From 1944 to
1946 Millar served as a communications officer in the United States
Naval Reserve in the Pacific, aboard the escort carrier Shipley Bay. As a novelist he debuted with The Dark Tunnel
(1944), a Buchanesque spy thriller partly based on a prewar visit in
Germany. At the beginning of the story, the narrator, an American
academic named Robert Branch, has a short romance in Munich in 1937.
"Then we went downtown on a streetcar and had a lunch together, and
after that we went to the basement of the Hofbrauhaus for beer. I drank
a couple of liters out of huge crockery mugs. I was feeling jolly and
she was as light-hearted again as a young girl. I felt very jolly and
forgot about Hitler and loved all the jolly, sweating Germans who were
drinking beer and eating pale sausages in the basement of the
Hofbrauhaus." (The Dark Tunnel, with a new introduction by Bill Pronzini, MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, 2013, p. 35) The front cover blurb of the 1950 Lion edition says, "The story of a homosexual spy." Alfred A. Knopf, Millar's publisher, did not change a line of his first Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target (1949).
James Sandoe, then the top mystery critic in the U.S., called it in his Chicago Sun-Times review "the most creditable [Chandler] imitation I have read and a narrative that keeps one steadily absorbed." (Ross MacDonald: A Biography by Tom Nolan, 2008, p. 108) Raymond Chandler himself mocked Macdonald's prose in a letter to Sandoe: "Have read The Moving Target
by John Ross Macdonald and am a good deal impressed by it, in a
peculiar way. In fact I could use it as the springboard for a sermon on
How Not to be a Sophisticated writer. . . . I think that certain
writers are under a compulsion to write in recherche phrases as a
compensation for a lack of some kind of natural animal emotion. They
feel nothing, they are literary eunuchs, and therefore they fall back
on an oblique terminology to prove their distinction." (Raymond Chandler Speaking, edited by Dorothy Gardiner and Kahrine Sorley Walker, 1997, pp. 54-55) The Moving Target was followed by several other novels, and two short story collections depicting Philip Marlowe-inspired
private eye, whose last appearance occurs in The Blue Hammer.
"The leap from Coleridge studies to the American detective novel is not
so unlikely or bathetic as it first appears," Millar has said.
"Coleridge's American disciple Poe both invented the detective story
and inspired Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire's 'Dandy,' poised in the
urban inferno, is one of the prototypes of the modern detective hero
from Sherlock Holmes to Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe." ('Millar, Kenneth ("John Ross Macdonald," "Ross Macdonald"),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, 1975, p. 993) The first half-dozen books in the series were written in the postwar tradition of private eye stories.
This was emphasized in some of the hard-boiled jacket copies: "... Lew Archer, private detective
in the land of dream-California; in the land of peaches and honey, misery and murder-male and female!
The name is Archer and don't get me wrong - It's not that women are greedier
than men..." (from The Name is Archer, Bantam Books, 1955, artist: Mitchell Hooks) However,
actually Archer was a nonviolent, liberal-hum anist detective and even
the murderer in the first Archer novel quotes Kierkegaard. Millar
rejected Chandler's conventional antagonism between good and evil and
condemned Spillane's "down the drain" prose. "My subject is human
error," Millar wrote to his publisher in the early 1950s. ('The 50 Greatest Crime Writers, No 19: Ross Macdonald,' The Sunday Times, April 17, 2008) In 1956 Millar moved with his family to San Francisco area for a year. " . . . people suffered in California just as they did in other places—suffered a little more, perhaps, because they didn't get much sympathy from the weather." (The Three Roads, Bantam Books, 1983, p. 20; originally published in 1948) He underwent in Menlo Park a period of psychotherapy, which helped him to find his own approach to the popular genre. The Galton Case reflected this new phase with its Freudian overtones; The Doomsters (1958) had already marked a break with the Chandler tradition. Archer is hired by an elderly woman to find her son, Anthony Galton. He has disappeared twenty-three years before. When Archer examines the family's troubled past, the story begins to take themes from the Oedipus legend. In the subsequent novels people often commit a crime because of events in their family history. Archer's method of uncovering family skeletons has much similarities with psychoanalysis, although he has much troubles in collecting merely the facts. Answers are found within the relationship between parents and children and hidden family problems. The formula, where Archer reveals past crimes reflecting Greek tragedies or have
Biblical allusions, become Macdonald's trade mark. In this process Archer is not taking
the role of tough private eye, but he helps his clients to deeper self-knowledge. He is
neutral - the
really interesting people are his clients and other characters. And
often Archer's clients hide crucial information about their past.
Archer is not a Freudian investigator of the diseases of modern life,
who interpreters human behavior mainly inside a sexual framework.
Besides sex, money and
power explain motifs behind crimes. Wealth corrupts and poverty has a
destructive effect on Millar's characters, who have high hopes and
pursuit the American dream. In later books Archer constantly helped
troubled young people, lost sons and daughters, but his main concern
was his own generation. Sea and water are recurring images and can
suggest hidden secrets under the surface, and danger and death, as in The Moving Target.
"A few pairs of headlights went north through the fog like the eyes of
deep-sea fish. Below the guardrail the sea breathed and gargled in the
darkness." (Ibid., Bantam Books, 1977, p. 103) "Starving to death in a mountain cabin, drowned the bottom of the sea, or wearing a hole in the head like Eddie." (Ibid., p. 112) "The sea looked close enough for a dive, but hard as metal." (Ibid., p. 113) The sea was cold and
dangerous. It held dead men." (Ibid., p. 134) "Nothing
in sight lived or moved, except the sea iself and a few weak puffs of
wind in the withered grass on the hillside. I felt for my gun butt." (Ibid., p. 150) In Sleeping Beauty (1973)
a leaking offshore oil platform reveals irresponsibility in the
business world and in the personal level. Laurel Russo, the
granddaughter of the founder of the oil company, is though to be a
memorial to Millar's daughter, Linda, his one and only child, who died
of a brain hemorrhage at the age of thirty-one. In 1956 she had been
committed to the State Hospital at Camarillo, after she was involved in
a hit-and-run vehicular homicide. Her eleven-day disappearance in 1959
caused Millar to be hospitalized and treated for hypertension. Millar became with his wife active in environmental causes in the 1960s and wrote articles on the subject for Sports Illustrated and the San Francisco Chronicle.
In 1969 he helped to lead protests following a massive oil spill off
the coast of Santa Barbara. His close friends included the author and
enviromentalist Robert Easton. They joined forces to protect the
endangered California condor and founded the Santa Barbara Citizens for
Environmental Defense. Millar wrote the introduction to Easton's Black Tide: The Santa Barbara Oil Spill and Its Consequences (1972). Millar's correspondence with the writer Eudora Welty came out in 2015. Welty reviewed his novel, The Underground Man (1971), for the New York Times Book Review,
and as a response he wrote to her: "As you know a writer and his work
don't really exist until they've been read. You have given me the
fullest and most explicit reading I've ever had, or that I ever
expected." (Eudora Welty: A Biography by Suzanne Marrs, 2015, p. 355) In The Chill (1964), which was awarded the Silver Dagger by the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain, Archer is engaged to trace a missing spouse, Dolly, who has run away from Alex Kincaid after their marriage. The problems of the newlyweds are mixed with a trail of a murder. Fredrick Kincaid, Alex's father, tries to deny his responsibility and have the marriage annulled, but Archer tells him: "Somebody has to assume responsibility. There's a lot of it floating around loose at the moment. You can't avoid it by crawling into a hole and pulling the hole in after you. The girl's in trouble, and whether you like it or not she's a member of your family." (The Chill, Vintage Books, 1991, p. 120) Buried memories and anguished relations between parents and children are dealt in such novels as The Far Side of the Dollar (1965), and The Underground Man, in which Archer thinks in the last page: "I hoped it was over. I hoped that Ronny's life wouldn't turn back toward his father's death as his father's life had turned, in a narrowing circle. I wished the boy a benign failure of memory." (Ibid., Bantam Books, 1984, p. 249) Archer has been played by Paul Newman in two films Harper (1966), based on first Archer novel and updated in the 1960s, and The Drowning Pool (1975), from the 1950 novel. In Harper, scripted by William Goldman, Humphrey Bogart's former wife Lauren Bacall played opposite Newman. When Bacall asks Harper, "Like a drink?" the answer is, "Not before lunch" – he is a new type of a detective. (Philip Marlowe do not refuse a drink offered by his client, General Sternwood, in the 1939 novel The Big Sleep.) Newman later claimed he modelled his character on Robert F. Kennedy. Brian Keith played Archer in NBC television series in 1975. Peter Graves was Archer in its pilot movie, The Underground Man, premiered in 1974 Millar's books have been bestsellers in hardcovers. The author was featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine. William Goldman has called Archer books "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American" in his review of The Goodbye Look in New York Times Book Review. ('Lew Archer is back on the case' by Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times, August 22, 2007) Macdonald was named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1973. He wrote a study of crime writing (1973), and an autobiography under the title Self-Portrait (1981). Kenneth Millar's collected reviews from San Francisco Chronicle and from other magazines and newspapers appeared in 1980. He died of Alzheimers in Santa Barbara on July 11, 1983. For further reading: 'Millar, Kenneth ("John Ross Macdonald," "Ross Macdonald"), in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); Dreamers Who Live Their Dreams by Peter Wolfe (1976); Ross Macdonald by Jerry Speir (1978); Kenneth Millar / Ross Macdonald: A Descriptive Bibliography by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1983); The American Private Eye by David Geherin (1985); 'Macdonald, Ross' by Larry N. Landrum, in Twentieth-century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly (1985); Long Way from Solving That One by Jeffrey Howard Mahan (1990); Hard-Boiled Heretic: The Lew Archer Novels of Ross Macdonald by Mary S. Weinkauf (1994); Ross Macdonald: A Biography by Tom Nolan (1999); A Ross Macdonald Companion by Robert L. Gale (2002); The Novels Of Ross Macdonald by Michael Kreyling (2005); 'Kenneth Millar (Ross Macdonald),' in The House of Knopf, 1915-1960: A Documentary Volume, edited by Cathy Henderson and Richard W. Oram (2010); Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald, edited by Suzanne Marrs and Tom Nolan (2015); It's All One Case: the Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives, by Paul Nelson & Kevin Avery; with Jeff Wong (2016); The Truman Gumshoes: The Postwar Detective Fiction of Mickey Spillane, Ross Macdonald, Wade Miller and Bart Spicer by J.K. Van Dover (2022) Selected Lew Archer novels:
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