It’s All One Case

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.

End Of The Century

The process of re-reading can be a strange one, I think. Personally I have never been one for doing much of it. There is always something ‘new’ to move onto, after all, and a book requires so much more time and attention than a record, say, or even a film. Both of those media reward our focus of course, but they seldom require immediate investment of more than a couple of hours at a time. Indeed the best long-player records can be over in a half hour. A film, an hour on top of that. A book though? A detective novel? Four of five hours maybe, and that spread over the space of days, weeks, depending on circumstances. I know some people take months to finish a book and that is fine because everyone’s lives and demands are different, but I struggle to remember what’s going on beyond three or four days. Occasionally I’ll manage a book in a single sitting but that is much rarer than it used to be and is surely as reliable a measurement of age as anything else.

I know too that many people have books they return to on a fairly regular basis. They are something of a comfort blanket perhaps. Familiarity with the magic of their prose, or with the resolution of their narratives lends a certain solace maybe. It never ceases to amaze me the number of times people can read Jane Austen, for example. I have tried reading her books and been defeated each time. I think the reasons are to do with the structure of the writing, but I am not intellectually informed enough on those things to be certain. Maybe one day it will click and make sense in much the same way Bruce Springsteen’s records did, though I admit my saying this is largely an excuse to put Springsteen and Austen in the same sentence.

Forcing myself to re-read books for this project then has been interesting. Mostly I realise how little I remember.

I do know however that it was 2003 when I was feverishly picking up and reading as much by Ross Macdonald as I possibly could because an old train ticket fell out of a copy of ‘Black Money’. It is one of those great Black Lizard ‘crime classics’ paperback editions with very period 1990s graphic design. The pages are now yellowed but it looks terrific in a photograph with a morning coffee, which is one of my ongoing projects, or habits or whatever. The photographs I mean, not the coffee, although of course it is both.

I’ll get back to Ross Macdonald eventually, I promise, but for now let me go off an on tangent and say that the photographs of beverages and books started in 2015 and that the first picture I made was of Joseph Hansen’s great ‘Fadeout’ alongside a coffee in a mug from The Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. Hansen’s short series of novels featuring his detective Dave Brandstetter are well worth seeking out. He’s celebrated mostly these days as being the first openly gay detective character, and that is to be applauded of course. There is certainly a degree of Hansen reclaiming the whole queer identity and reframing the language in positive ways within the books, but they are also just really well crafted detective stories that maybe help shine a light on the strange strained suffusion of homoerotic sexual tensions that exist in much of the hard boiled stuff. All those manly figures showing off their toughness to each other. Psychiatrists would have a field day.

Another of my early beverage and book photographs was made in the Boston Tea Party cafe in Exeter. I recognise the table grain and one of their big white mugs holding a black coffee. The book is Don Carpenter’s ‘Hard Rain Falling’, one of those really nice New York Review Of Books paperbacks with a terrific cover photograph by Ken Light. It’s not a detective novel, but it is a story of crime and punishment and redemption of sorts. Carpenter is Dostoyevsky if he’d been around in the Beat Generation. His fans include Jonathan Lethem, Anne Lamont and Richard Price, who all supply effusive copy for the back cover. There’s an introduction too by George Pelecanos, which is naturally worth reading.

Pelecanos should be given a lot of credit here because, when I think about it, he was maybe my line (back) into detective fiction when the Serpent’s Tail imprint published his trilogy of Nick Stefanos mysteries in 1998. That late 1990s period was a pretty hectic time for me. I’d been teaching art in a Devon high school for six years by 1998 but still somehow found the time to be writing pretty much non stop about music and books. By 1998 too the Tangents.co.uk website would have been running for a couple of years, growing as it did out of a decade or more of fanzine writing and publishing. I’m fairly certain I had blagged review copies of other books from Serpent’s Tail and that they sent me the Pelecanos trilogy as part of their regular publicity mail out. I’m glad they did because really those books hit me like a freight train. Something about elements coming together serendipitously at the same time, maybe, but Pelecanos seemed like a voice that connected. The intensity of his prose in those Stefanos books still prickles with the energy of the DC Hardcore punk bands he’d maybe have been seeing in his formative years. The Pop cultural references effortlessly root the stories to place and time but crucially never feel forced. That’s much more difficult than it sounds.

In his later books there is perhaps a sense of Pelecanos getting sidetracked by Issues based narrative arcs, but I would say his attempts to address more serious, grown up topics like political corruption never feel as lightly done as, say, Chandler managed. That can be taken as a criticism or as praise though, so take your pick. Throughout though Pelecanos has never lost his talent for capturing speech, being as skilled in that area as any of the tough school predecessors or indeed his contemporaries. He neatly continues the hard boiled predilection for detective characters who are tough yet sensitive, soft yet strong, maybe much like Pelecanos himself. That was certainly the feeling I got when I interviewed him at the tiny Nantos Hotel, a Greek place in London where he was doing some publicity back in 1998 to promote the his just published ‘The Sweet Forever’. At the time I was doing this thing on Tangents called ‘Mass Observation’ which was a bunch of questions split in two sections, one for the present day and one for when people were 16 years old. This conceit was all tied up in the notion that 16, or at least the conceptual age of 16 is when we are ‘born’, pop-culturally speaking. It’s a flawed conceit of course, but I mostly stand by it. Anyway, the opening questions went like this:
“Where are you?”
“Nantos hotel, London.”
“What are you?”
“A Greek American writer.”

And then the third question, which was intended as one about the creative output, and couched in British English colloquialism: “What do you make?”

“What do I MAKE?”. I thought Pelecanos was going to hit me. End of interview right there. Of course he naturally interpreted this from an American perspective and assumed I was being outrageously nosey about his income. “What do I MAKE?…” In the astonished pause, I quickly realised how he had taken the question and I just as quickly filled the pause with an explanation of the intention. Thankfully he laughed and went with it. “Books” was the blunt and pretty obvious answer, the unspoken part being, did I really have to ask?

Perhaps unsurprisingly that session with Pelecanos was the start and pretty much the end of my foray into the realm of the journalistic interview. Teaching increasingly took up my time, and that was a pretty tough job, even back at the end of the 20th Century. It’s much harder now, although that’s another story, the kind of story Pelecanos would probably tell really well. In fact he kind of did, though obviously from an American perspective, in season 4 of the TV show ‘The Wire’ in which the character of Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski takes on a job as a Math teacher in a Baltimore middle school. By season 4 Pelecanos had dialled back his involvement in the show to focus on a new book, but he still got some writing credits. I recall seeing Pelecanos’ name in the credits for the show when it screened in the UK and being so pleased because he had answered my Mass Observation question about what he wanted to be when he was 16 with “I wanted to make movies.” So ‘The Wire’ was not exactly a movie, but it was close. Maybe better.

So I think I’ve got a lot to be grateful to George Pelecanos for. He kind of scared the shit out of me, yes, but he hooked me (back) into the detective genre, so he is to thank for all of this. Or to blame. Take your pick.

Someone else who dug Pelecanos was James Sallis. His 2001 novel ‘Ghost Of A Flea’ is the sixth and final instalment of a tremendous series featuring detective Lew Griffin and at one point Griffin is to be found “reading a novel set in Washington by some guy with a Greek name”. Elsewhere in the book Sallis drops references to the Rebel Inc imprint which was so enormously important back at the turn of the 20th to 21st Centuries with its reprints of such essentials as John Fante, Jim Dodge’s ‘Stone Junction’, and Emmett Grogan’s mighty ‘Ringolevio’. Sallis describes it as ‘a new publishing house in Scotland run by a bunch of kids’. The story of Rebel Inc is fascinating in itself, with its roots in the world of fanzines and the strange literate punk energies of Edinburgh. There is a fun story of Alan Warner sending some poetry for potential inclusion in the ‘Rebel Inc’ magazine back in the 1990s, and signing it all as being by/from Morvern Callar (Warner was still writing the novel of the same name at the time). Publisher of the ‘Rebel Inc’ ‘zine Kevin Williamson however recognised the handwriting on the envelope as being Warner’s. He says that “Warner probably thinks I’ve forgotten but I don’t forget anything like that. I remember everything.”

Lew Griffin remembers everything too. He’s forever bringing up quotations and peppering them through his books. Lots of philosophy, Emerson in particular. And of course I say Lew Griffin when I really mean James Sallis. It’s James Sallis who manages to pull up all sorts of delightful philosophical gems and he just happens to use Lew Griffin to give them voice. Such is the life of the writer. Of course Lew Griffin himself is a writer too as well as a teacher, an investigator and a drunk. Not that Sallis is all of those things, or indeed any of those things except writer, although perhaps somewhere inside we are all of us all of those things at some point in our lives, to a greater or lesser degree, with more or less adherence to dictionary definitions. Anyway, to coin a phrase some of my Tangents writer friends and I used a lot, James Sallis writes like God.

But only sometimes. I once read his spy thriller ‘Death Will Have Your Eyes’, and it was not that great. But the Lew Griffin novels, now that’s another matter. Of course all the greatest Noir has always at core been about Identity, and this is probably why Sartre and Camus were such fans. Sallis understands this implicitly, and the Lew Griffin novels are notably as much about identity and spirit as they are about crime. Indeed, in ‘Ghost Of A Flea’ and to a lesser extent in ‘Bluebottle’, crime barely comes into it, the books being much more about the nature of exploration or, if you will, investigation; looking for clues as to who and why we are what we are as much as to solve any misdemeanour. Perhaps also the only misdemeanour is our very existence on this Earth, but maybe that’s getting altogether too maudlin and end-of-the-world weary.

Sallis writes as much as anything about the splendour of books, and the splendour of life and people. He writes about the search for meaning in words and in faces, gestures, touches, kisses, words shared, exchanges… all of this thrown up and examined and found both life-affirming and wanting at the same time. Of course all great Noir is essentially existential, and Sallis writes the poetry of the weary existential outsider with a sparkling mix of the coolest prose in the warmest of lonely hearts. His books still feel special.

Investigating nostalgia with young Americans

In the 1963 Poirot novel ‘The Clocks’, as we have seen, Agatha Christie uses one of the rare appearances of her little Belgian detective to engage in an amusing and informative exposition on the history of detective fiction. For the most part this focuses on some key French authors, a smattering of English (it would not do, one assumes, for Christie to be seen to throw either stones or bouquets in her own glass house) and a rogue appearance by the overrated American Mr John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr. When the subject of the hard-boiled ‘tough school’ of detective fiction comes up, however, Poirot dismisses it “much as he would have waved [away] an intruding fly or mosquito.” “‘Violence for violence’ sake?” he continues. “Since when has that been interesting?” 

It is a cutting riposte that, in the context of what he has just said about other authors and schools of thought, is perhaps a cute play on Christie’s part to show Poirot as being somewhat old fashioned and out of touch. In 1963, after all, the literary value of the hard-boiled school was surely well established  whilst the publicity-seeking fencing between the protagonists on opposite sides of the Atlantic would be largely a thing of the past. Indeed, after a pause for breath and thought, Hercules Christie admits that they rate “American crime fiction on the whole” in  “a pretty high place” and considers it “more ingenious, more imaginative than English writing.” One does of course rather wonder just what American crime fiction Agatha Poirot is thinking of here, if not any of the ‘tough school’. Mr John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr? One sincerely hopes not. Ellery Queen then?

When talking about American detective fiction it is likely that the name Ellery Queen was amongst the first I became aware of. Not the novels or short stories, you understand, but the character played by Jim Hutton in the American TV series. Screened in the UK by the BBC in 1976, it is one of the few television shows I can recall watching with the rest of my family. Seeing it again in 2024 is something of a shock of nostalgia, the layers of time travel being overlaid with mis-remembrance. Do I remember the show as being set in the late 1940s? What would that have even meant to a ten year old in 1976? Did I confuse or conflate Jim Rockford’s 1970s California with Jim Hutton’s 1940s New York? When Hutton/Ellery turned to camera, broke the fourth wall and suggested that I was probably way ahead of him and had spotted the murderer, did I ever nod and smugly announce that I was and that I had? As if. What was the fourth wall anyway? And at what point did I realise that there were actual Ellery Queen novels other than the imaginary ones Jim Hutton was writing in the show? History is obscure on the answer to the last one, although I can at least say with some certainty that it was not until 2021 that I finally read some real Ellery Queen books. ‘The French Powder Mystery’, ‘The Spanish Cape Mystery’ and ‘The Greek Coffin Mystery’ all struck me as much more rooted in English detective fiction than the raw rough and tumble of the Black Mask school and whilst they struck me as adequate period pieces they did little to really thrill me. I’m sure that the more puzzle-orientated aspect of Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee’s writing as Ellery Queen would have appealed to Poirot and Christie much more than they have done to me, and that is fine of course.

In terms of The Americans though, I am fairly certain that before the Ellery Queen TV show came into my orbit, there would have been a few books on my childhood bookshelf bearing the names of Carolyn Keen and Franklin W. Dixon. Unlike the Famous Five and Agatha Christie paperbacks, none of these Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys titles survived the occasional purges of personal history that I would have scowled through in my teens and twenties, but they are certainly worth thinking about again now, particularly as my rudimentary research about the Ellery Queen TV series suggests that the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew TV show of 1977-79 was screened by the BBC during 1979. Oddly (or not) I have no recollection of this at all. Archive ‘Radio Times’ listings show that it was broadcast on a late Saturday afternoon, after the Sport and Regional News (‘Scoreboard’ in Scotland ) and before a Rolf Harris show. Has some strange subliminal cancellation process seeped from the Harris reference and erased my Nancy Drew memories? Is memory in fact like ferric cassette or video tape, breaking up over time?  Well, mine has clearly unravelled from the case and no amount of rewinding with a pencil is going to help.

Looking online at the covers of the Drew and Hardy Boys titles published in the UK throughout the 1970s as Armada paperbacks brings slightly more of a flicker of recognition, particularly those yellow box Nancy Drew covers with the Peter Arthur illustrations. These may not be particularly memorable from a design perspective, but I admit that the sight of a red headed Nancy glancing over her shoulder in an anxious manner stirs the ancient memory of a ten year old’s crush. This is another piece of evidence for my not having seen the TV series, for I feel sure that my thirteen year old self could not have failed to have found Pamela Sue Martin incredibly crush-worthy.  Then again, at that age I would have struggled to see further than a girl called Veronica who sat beside me in Chemistry classes. This, of course, decades before she would find fame on British television screens as Ronni Ancona and surprise me by cropping up as Steve Coogan’s PA in the tremendous second series of ‘The Trip’. Seeing her there on screen oddly transported me back to 1979, sitting at the bottom of the stairs for hours trying to summon the courage to phone her number and ask her out. The anti-climax of finally hearing her say ‘no’ was, of course, savagely dispiriting. The following week she had moved tables in Chemistry and to say I missed hearing her passionate raving about Dustin Hoffman in my ear would be an understatement. I wonder if she ever read Nancy Drew stories? Wonder too if she was ever famous enough to get to meet Hoffman in person. I hope so.

I did re-read some Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew stories recently and found it an interesting experience. The first few Drew novels, ghostwritten in the early 1930s by Mildred Wirt Benson still read as thoroughly enjoyable mystery adventures. Wholesome fun, fired through with the kind of old-fashioned conservative American family values that knee-jerk jerks of a right leaning proclivity might suggest they are fighting to protect today. Nonsense, of course, for what comes over in these early Drew stories is a fundamental sense of decency and fairness that would seem to be anathema to much of 21st Century America. Shame.

Have The Hardy Boys aged as handsomely? Well, not to my eyes, although this is admittedly based on a very small selection of Leslie McFarlane penned books from the late 1920s and early 1930s. These, such as the 1928 title ‘Hunting For Hidden Gold’, read now as ridiculously robust action adventures that are fuelled more by testosterone and machismo than by anything so subtle as a mystery to be solved. Did I enjoy this kind of nonsense as a ten year old? I like to think not so much, and see this is a reason for their exclusion from those bookshelves where Enid Blyton was allowed to stay. Nancy Drew should certainly have been given a reprieve though.

Then there would be the Three Investigators books. Or, more accurately, ‘Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators’. In truth these would have been my brother’s paperbacks and I know there are at least a couple still surviving in our childhood home. Indeed, we were discussing them just recently, me in the midst of some re-reading and him going through the tortuous process of remembering The Past. It is interesting how some very clear specific memories can become ensnared by other flickers of recollection, a process which itself transforms that specific reality into something different. For example, my brother vividly recalls something about how ultra-low frequency sounds, whilst being inaudible to our ears, can nevertheless generate feelings of unease and terror. He remembers reading that when he was a young boy and credits this with being the start of a lifetime’s interest in science. The thing is, he has for many years put that memory together with Enid Bylton’s Secret Seven books (he was Secret Seven, I was Famous Five), whilst in fact it is something that is key to the solution of the first Three Investigators book, ‘The Secret of Terror Castle’. Now whilst I know I also read ‘Terror Castle’ as a youngster that fact about low-frequencies made little or no impact, and it was only my recent re-reading that allowed me to reposition the ‘truth’ in my brother’s memory. Part of me feels guilty about this, a sadness at fracturing a decades old connection for him between Blyton and the mysteries of science. Part of me too wonders what ‘truth’ will stick in, say, another ten or twenty years time. Will the neural connections long established in my brother’s brain between The Secret Seven and low frequency oscillation reestablish themselves and once again triumph over the ‘reality’? There’s a science experiment for him to ponder.

So there is certainly something interesting about the pursuit of cold scientific proof in The Three Investigators. It’s all very ‘Scooby Doo’, particularly in the first few books, in that the mysteries of haunted houses, spectral apparitions and whispering Egyptian mummies can be debunked by the application of cool deduction and scientific process. And yes, the adult criminals would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for the pesky kids…

There is also something interesting about the Three Investigators books being in many ways promotional materials for The American Dream. Start a business! Get a celebrity endorsement! Design a memorable logo and branding! Promote yourselves at every opportunity! Run another job on the side! Work all the hours under the sun! It’s all there. Of course the capitalist propagandising of those themes was way over my head as a ten year old but they stand out strongly when reading them again in 2024. Yet what also comes over in at least the early books is something about the triumph of the nerdy outsider. The Three Investigators may not be wacky Out There weirdoes, but neither are they the kind of archetypal privileged Californian kid that we were encouraged to despise in, say, John Hughes’ films of the 1980s. That kind of young adult is embodied by the Skinny Norris character in The Three Investigators, and although his is at best a bit part, he does remind us what Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews are not. What they are is irregular regular kids, characters who inhabit a strange kind of mediated middle ground in society, strangely untouched by the weird Pop Sub-Cultural happenings that would have been exploding around them in their contemporary mid to late 1960s California. These early books penned by Robert Arthur at least seem to exist in a strange pre-Pop realm, one that casts back to a pre-war Hollywood, which is apt given that by 1964 Alfred Hitchcock had the vast majority of his film-making career behind him. The preponderance of Egyptian mummies, movie stars of the silent screen and the abandoned mansions and estates of dubious 19th Century merchants makes The Three Investigators seem like conduits for conservative nostalgia. Again, this would have been lost on a ten year old in 1976 as it likely would have been on a ten year old in 1966. Yet this layering of nostalgia, where multiple coats of mediated memory have built up over the space of many decades now lend these books a peculiar patina. They belong elsewhere, or at least elsewhen, and part of their charm now is that they no longer seem to know what that might be themselves. 

I know how that feels.