Last time out I suggested that James Ellroy had a lot of traumatic childhood weight to carry and to process, and the same could be said of Kenneth Millar (aka Ross Macdonald – see, I promised I would eventually get back to him) and it is perhaps one of the reasons that Ellroy dedicated his 1984 novel ‘Blood On The Moon’ to the then recently deceased Millar. In an inscription pictured in the magnificent ‘Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives’ Ellroy draws attention to the dedication and writes that “He was a master: He kept me tremendously sane during bad years.”
To say that Millar was a master is to possibly understate things, for there is a certainly a compelling argument to be made that Millar was THE master of the American detective novel. In a series of eighteen books written between 1949 and 1976 the series detective Lew Archer saw his creator Ken Millar change his pseudonym from John Macdonald to John R. Macdonald to John Ross Macdonald and finally to the now familiar Ross Macdonald. The sequential name change was made in order to avoid confusion with another contemporaneous writer of detective fiction, John D. McDonald. John D.’s novels featuring “salvage consultant” Travis McGee are fine enough thrillers but largely leave me cool, even on re-reading. Personally I would stick to the ‘Cape Fear’ film (either Scorcese’s 1991 effort or the 1962 feature with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum) of the 1957 novel ‘The Executioner’ but I know others will disagree. Maybe I’m just too stubborn to change my mind over the choice of Macdonald/McDonald made back when the 21st Century was in its infancy and I was an impressionable and opinionated thirty-something.
But why did Kenneth Millar not just publish under his own name? Well, by the time Ken had anything significantly published his wife Margaret was making significant headway. Her 1945 novel ‘The Iron Gates’ was particularly well received at the time and still stands up as a terrific period piece, whilst the 1956 Edgar Award winning ‘Beast In View’ is rightly considered as something of a classic of the psychological mystery genre. Margaret’s many other mysteries are also fine, but perhaps any lasting popularity has been hurt by her not really having any ‘series’ character to speak of. Husband Ken made sure he had that in Lew Archer.
The first Lew Archer mystery that I ever read was ‘The Chill’, issued in a neat paperback edition back in 2001 as part of Canongate’s Crime Classics series. At the same time I would also have picked up Macdonald’s ‘The Drowning Pool’ and Charles Willeford’s ‘The Shark-Infested Custard’, all of them featuring the generic cover that showed what looked like a Saul Bass take on the Black Dahlia corpse viewed through a vaseline smeared lens. Willeford is certainly a writer worth exploring, and I devoured a lot of his work during the early naughties. The cover blurb for ‘The Shark-Infested Custard’ promises “an amoral update of Dumas’ ‘The Three Musketeers’ set in 1970s Miami” and it delivers in spades. Willeford did write terrific detective crime stories, notably the great series featuring his Hank Moseley character, but ‘The Shark-Infested Custard’ is really a crime book starring criminals, falling into a genre that would include the likes of the great Jim Thompson and Richard Stark (a pseudonym of Donald E. Westlake), whose ‘Parker’ series of novels are arguably the gold standard. All three of these writers are firmly rooted in the hard boiled tough school of Noir fiction and are massively entertaining. Ross Macdonald, though, is a step or two apart and Lew Archer is way ahead.
‘The Chill’ is the eleventh book in the Lew Archer series and was originally published in 1964, two years before I was born. Now oftentimes I like to start any extended series of books at the beginning and to read them in order of publication. You can blame a certain amount of Poirot-esque OCD for this if you like. This approach is relatively easy these days given that so much is readily accessible via the Internet, but it was not always so. Even at the turn of the millennium, when Canongate reissued ‘The Chill’, it was difficult to just walk into your local book store and see the entire sequence of any writer’s work ranged in front of you. Even in a city, and even with the big names like Christie, Sayers, Allingham or whoever, there would be gaps. If you were charity shopping then the odds of finding what you were after were even less, though balanced by the possibility of finding unknown gems for a few pence. It was a case of take what you can and be thankful for it. There was a peculiar pleasure in that too of course. Still is.
If there is any author whose novels featuring a series detective can easily be read and enjoyed out of order though it is Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer books. Macdonald/Ken Millar was fond of using the phrase “it’s all one case” as a means of tying all the apparently disparate elements of the arcs and characters in any given novel into one cohesive conclusion, and indeed to define the gestalt of the entire Archer series. It’s not so much that all eighteen Lew Archer books are the same story re-written and refined each time (though one might argue this is the case to an extent), it’s that Millar weaves the same themes throughout everything. Unrelentingly and unapologetically so. Concerns about identity, familial discord, moral corruption wrought by money and Freudian psychiatric theories run blatantly throughout. Relationships between fathers and daughters are high on the agenda, as are sons looking for lost fathers. It might all quickly become a bit overpowering if it was not so perfectly crafted.
Following a formula is one of the keys to success in genre fiction of course, just as it is in music, painting, cinema, whatever. It should not be read as criticism to say as much either. No-one sits in a room full of Rothko paintings and complains that they all look the same, after all. At least not if they have even a grain of humanity in their body.
The early Macdonald novels and the first number of Lew Archer stories certainly do largely follow the formula of the hard boiled tough school. Ken Millar needed to make a living, after all, so best not mess too much with the tried and tested formula. There was plenty of competition in the 1940s/50s detective fiction marketplace of course, particularly in the USA, and there was certainly too a degree of literary snobbery about some of the more popular authors. Millar in particular seemed to have issues with the enormous popularity of Mickey Spillane and Erle Stanley Gardner. Spillane’s stories featuring the ultimate tough-guy detective Mike Hammer sold millions, as did Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books, and it would be easy to suggest that Millar, who seemed always to be caught between the intellectual pull of literary academia and the desire to make money writing, was simply playing the sniffy snob role about wildly successful popular, or populist culture. Like other critics such as Millar’s English crime novelist friend Julian Symons, Millar had a point when he expressed distaste for Spillane’s rock bottom roughhousing no-holds-barred style for what Millar called the “kick-’em-in-the-teeth crowd”, but then again Spillane had come up writing for comics in their own Golden Age, penning stories for ‘Superman’, ‘Batman’ and ‘Captain America’. This in a time long before the elevation of comic book writing to an ‘art form’, and instead in a realm where Bang! Pow! Shazam! short sharp hitting was the order of the day. In such a context I think that Spillane’s books are great entertainment, though most certainly not for everyone, particularly in the second decade of the 21st Century. Stanley Gardner’s books are more sedate by comparison, but are neatly plotted and often give the reader a fine mystery where good always outwits evil and American Values emerge victorious. His books written as A.A. Fair featuring the Donald Lam and Bertha Cool characters are harder edged than the Perry Mason stories and remain great favourites of mine. Hardly the height of fine literature that Ken Millar aspired to (and eventually attained) with his Lew Archer books, but tremendous stuff regardless.
Oddly, perhaps, Millar seemed to have had more time for the work of Michael Avallone, whose enormously popular work included the first ‘Man From U.N.C.L.E.’ novel in 1965. Avallone’s series of books featuring his Ed Noon character are preposterous tales, a blend of James Bond spy thriller and tough guy detective with some bizarro American propagandising thrown in the mix. The Ed Noon books read like Stateside Leslie Charteris stories with a Red China fixation in the later books and are just as entertaining if you like that sort of thing. Ken Millar particularly dug the 1973 title ‘Shoot It Again Sam’ and Avallone considered it his definitive Ed Noon novel, probably because it is the one where Avallone runs riot with Noon’s predilection for quoting from old movies, and Noir pictures in particular. If you only read one Ed Noon it should be this one, though don’t be surprised if you find yourself intrigued to read more despite a nagging feeling that you really oughtn’t.
Outside of some of his contemporaries and competitors though there is certainly a lineage to be seen going from Hammett through Chandler to the early Lew Archer stories. Millar seemed to get a bit antsy about the continual comparison to Chandler, however, mostly because Chandler went out of his way to disparage Millar’s early work as being a copy of his own. Such sparring is understandable in the context of a time when their working lives overlapped but feels largely irrelevant today. There is undoubtedly a Chandler influence in the Lew Archer books but whereas Chandler’s plots often come across as wildly disjointed semi-abstract collages always on the verge of collapse, Millar’s by comparison are equally convoluted but hold together with astonishing poise and ultimate cohesion. No pieces feel like they have been forced into place. Everything does actually fit.
One thing that certainly fits in the Lew Archer stories are the connections out to Kenneth Millar’s own life experiences. Whilst hardly necessary in order to enjoy the Ross Macdonald fiction, if you ever read a Lew Archer book and get hooked (five on a ten says you will) then doing even a modicum of background reading will bring an intriguing level of insight. Tom Nolan’s superlative biography is probably as much as you’d need, although tracking down ‘It’s All One Case: The Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives’ by Paul Nelson, Kevin Avery and Jeff Wong is well worth the effort, even if just to enjoy all the period jacket designs.
From a 21st Century perspective, and particularly for anyone involved in the education sector, there are elements of the father/daughter themes in the Lew Archer novels, and in the troubled behaviours of Millar’s teenaged daughter Linda through the 1950s to set off safeguarding klaxons. Underage drinking and relations with older boys came to a head in 1956, when Linda was charged with the hit and run killing of a thirteen year old boy in Santa Barbara. Three years later, whilst on parole and under psychiatric care she disappeared from her college dorm room, sparking a widely publicised eleven day police hunt. The Millar’s themselves recruited private investigators to search for their daughter, and whilst this in itself seemed like a case of truth mirroring fiction, Ken Millar went a step further, recycling events in future Archer novels, notably with a gender flip in ‘The Goodbye Look’ published a decade later.
Millar’s fixation on father/daughter relationships tails off a little through the Lew Archer books of the 1960s, but is front and centre in the 1950s and surely anyone involved in the 1956 hit and run case who read any of Ken Millar’s novels would have raised eyebrows, if not concerns. Different times, certainly.
Then again, when I first read the Lew Archer novels at the turn of the millennium I had been teaching for ten years and I do not recall being particularly bothered by some of what I read in the books. As a teacher and tutor of course the importance of child safeguarding was always paramount, and whilst I was aware of some pretty sorrowful cases, it is also true to say this was as nothing compared to the level of heightened awareness throughout the second half of my thirty year teaching career. In a leadership role during that period I could not help but be made more and more aware of safeguarding concerns, which perhaps explains why, when I re-read the first twelve Lew Archer novels in the first months of my early retirement in 2021/22 I could not help but be drawn up short by a lot of the content. It would be easy to pull questionable quotes at length, but here’s one from ‘The Chill’ in 1964: “when Dad gets upset it has a peculiar effect on me. It’s like sympathetic vibrations: he goes to pieces, I go to pieces. Not that I’m blaming him.’” Archer responds with: “‘I’m blaming him.’” Which might read as Millar blaming him, and which might then also read as Millar blaming himself. And whilst there is surely a large element of truth in the suggestion that Ken Millar writes Lew Archer as a character who keeps rescuing daughters because to a large extent Millar could not save his own, there lurks beyond all this the suggestion of something darker, perhaps. There is an intriguing line in Ed Nolan’s biography, discussing Millar’s attitudes to all of this. Millar suggests that his wife Margaret “had a need for “a jealous and exclusive love,”” and he “thought his wife hypersensitive to “the fairly normal incestuous content in the father-daughter relationship.””
Different times, as I say. Or maybe not. Maybe things just get talked about differently, brushed under carpets differently, obscured differently. Maybe nothing fundamentally changes in human nature at all or maybe everything is a result of the ways in which our popular cultures mediate and manipulate perceptions of ‘normality’, shifting as they do with every passing generation. Maybe too I have been overly sensitised through thirty years of teaching. It is also possible that Millar’s preoccupation with saving young female characters is simply a symptom of an instinct common amongst fathers with daughters. Not being a parent I have no reference point for this at all, but it seems plausible. Plausible too is that it is as a result of prolonged exposure to media coverage of crime and tragedy. Indeed in his 1951 novel ‘The Way Some People Die’ Lew Archer reflects that he “keep(s) thinking of the Black Dahlia, all the young girls that have been stolen away and destroyed by evil men.” Millar and Ellroy connected again.
So yes, it is possible to dive in at pretty much any point in the Lew Archer series and come up trumps. If pushed to pick one Lew Archer mystery though, I think that it would be the eighth instalment, 1959’s ‘The Galton Case’. Some critics have suggested this is the novel in which Ken Millar really finds his mature voice, and there is a strong case to be made for that. Although the somewhat obsessive theme of father/daughter relationships will continue to crop up in various guises in future books, in ‘The Galton Case’ it is replaced with a more successful musing on the nature of identity. The book engages with typical detective tropes of missing persons, this time most explicitly referencing Millar’s difficult childhood and detachment at a young age from his own father. It is not important to know any of this to thoroughly enjoy and appreciate the book, but it does add an extra layer of interest, particularly when one considers the ideas of identity with regards author and character. Where does Ken Millar end and Ross Macdonald begin? And how does that persona of the writer blend with the character of Lew Archer in particular? It is true that as consumers of art and media we ought to be wary of projecting the qualities of the works onto the creators, and this is particularly true in the realm of fiction writing. The clue is in the word ‘fiction’, after all. Yet Millar is certainly a case where this boundary between truth and fiction is particularly finely poised. So much of Millar’s own experiences undeniably do find their way into his writing, so it does seem perfectly valid to wonder whether Lew Archer is speaking with a voice of imagination or of Millar’s personal experience. Never quite knowing is surely a large part of the continuing appeal.
One thing in ‘The Galton Case’ that almost certainly reflects Millar’s own cultural taste is that he uses the book to cast a curious and somewhat supercilious eye over the Beat Generation. It’s clear that Millar has little time for this particular incarnation of Youth Culture, yet typically he cannot quite allow Lew Archer to be wholly dismissive.
Ken Millar did share a love of jazz with the Beats, however, and at times he talked about wanting to construct his novels the way jazz musicians approached musical pieces. I’m not certain that comes over in his texts, but in ‘The Galton Case’ he certainly writes a nightclub jazz scene that, whilst much more restrained than Kerouac, is equally good: “The Listening Ear was full of dark blue light and pale blue music. A combo made up of piano, bass fiddle, trumpet, and drums was playing something advanced. I didn’t have my slide rule with me, but the four musicians seemed to understand each other. From time to time they smiled and nodded like space jockeys passing in the night. The man at the piano seemed to be the head technician. He smiled more distantly than the others, and when the melody had been done to death, he took the applause with more exquisite remoteness. Then he bent over his keyboard again like a mad scientist.”
Archer gives over the feeling that Ken Millar might prefer the jazz to be slightly different in style and performance, but he certainly digs it just the same.
Then there is an amusing swipe at Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ when the poet performing at the club takes “a roll of manuscript out of his inside breast pocket” before proceeding to perform: “Death Is Tabu,” he said, and began to chant in a hoarse carrying voice that reminded me of a carnival spieler. He said that at the end of the night he sat in wino alley where the angels drink canned heat, and that he heard a beat.” As critiques go it is certainly less cutting that Truman Capote’s “that’s not writing, it’s typing”, but it’s still a soft swipe.
The fictional poet in the nightclub (named Bolling) is based not on Kerouac but on Kenneth Rexroth, who The Beats saw as something of a significant influence and who Millar saw as being better than what he begat, as it were. There is certainly a degree of warmth shown towards Bolling by Archer, who notes that “Like other performers, he had a public face and a private one. Each of them was slightly phony, but the private face suited him better.”
My friend Joe suggests that the scene where Archer and Bolling visit the San Francisco shore and the poet talks about building a new Athens there is a deliberate echo of the opening of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. Unlike Joe I am no academic literary expert, but I am quite certain that he is correct. Elsewhere in Millar’s novels there are Classical and other literary references (notably to Samuel Taylor Coleridge) that go way over my head, but that is fine. There is no need to ‘get’ the references to enjoy the novels. And whilst they might be described as Easter Eggs hidden in the text to delight any unsuspecting literary experts lured into reading detective mysteries I suspect too that their very existence lends Millar’s writing the elevated sense of magnificence that ‘ordinary’ readers like me sense without really understanding. Millar keeps the brilliance delicately cloaked, and therein lies its magic.
If Lew Archer, and by association Ken Millar, seems to hold something of a disliking for the Beats and a degree of bewildered lack of understanding of their youthful audience then it is perhaps a reflection of that state one gets to when one suddenly no longer seems to understand younger generations. It is a feeling, I think, that appears to work by stealth, and on reflection one can never pinpoint the moment it happens. I do not think this is any big deal, incidentally; no longer believe it is in any way related to hazy notions of ‘selling out’ or whatever I used to proclaim when I was younger and even more foolish. Archer/Millar looks on the Beat kids in ‘The Galton Case’ with a degree of generational detachment, then, and whilst he continues to do so through the remainder of his books he retains always a certain protective warmth towards youth. In 1962’s ‘The Zebra-Striped Hearse’ Archer encounters some post-beat teenage surfer kids, and then nine years later chances up against what would be their natural development in ’The Underground Man’, all long hair and mistrustful looks and attitudes. Archer can’t help but be grudgingly admiring of their Outsider pose, even as he tacitly acknowledges that he himself is emblematic of The Man. It’s like Millar is nodding towards the knowledge that it is inherently difficult for youth to recognise salvation/help in older generations and/or in established structures, just as the opposite relationship can be equally impossible. Millar positions Archer to be the pivot upon which that eternally problematic relationship hinges and he does it exquisitely well. He is careful too not to get drawn into commentary about specific cultural phenomena, and Archer’s dialogue in particular treads the fine line between Californian street/beach vocabulary and sound fictional conventions. It’s just one of the factors that make the Lew Archer books so very evocative of time and place whilst simultaneously appearing timeless. Awareness of the value of being seen to be informed by, but equally outside of contemporary events might explain why Millar turned down two financially lucrative offers to write (as Ross Macdonald) about the grisly Manson murders in 1969. If Millar was to artfully blur the boundaries between fact and fiction then they should at least be his own personal ones.
As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s it could be said that the final three Lew Archer books (‘The Underground Man’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Blue Hammer’) seem to almost imperceptibly fall away in terms of quality. If they were by any other writer it could justifiably be said that they contain flashes of brilliance, but set beside the white heat brilliance of previous Macdonalds they just feel to be in their shadow somewhat. Then again, perhaps this can only be sensed when reading an extensive batch of Archer mysteries in one go. To have experienced them in their contemporary contexts (1971, ’73 and ’76) would doubtless have been a terrific experience, yet I still cannot help wonder if that “anticipation is so much better” line so eloquently used by The Delta 5 in their ‘Anticipation’ single of 1980 might have applied even to an Archer fan at the time. Certainly by the time of 1976’s concluding ‘The Blue Hammer’ Ken Millar was starting to show signs of the Alzheimer’s that would eventually consume his brilliant mind. In the tremendous extended interview sessions with Paul Nelson that forms the basis for ‘The Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives’ there are moments where memory fails. For the vast majority of the interviews Millar is astoundingly sharp and erudite, remarkably well-read and marvellously rounded. He covers up the memory slips admirably, but you can just about see the cracks starting to appear and it is heartbreaking.
Best by far then to remember Ken Millar as the Ross Macdonald (and vice versa) of the 1950s and 1960s, books filled with characters and plots that like the author are complex, challenging, troubling, intricately interconnected, intellectually stimulating and endlessly entertaining. He was simply, as James Ellroy suggested, the master.
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