COLETTE'S LIST

Book Reviews Writ Loud

by Colette Bancroft

Betrayal & Madness, Loss & Redemption

>> Colette on Macdonald's Lew Archer Novels

ROSS MACDONALD'S DETECTIVE HERO, Lew Archer, is among the most laconic of a tight-lipped breed. Throughout the 18 novels he narrates, he delves into the psyches and histories and secrets of countless characters while keeping his own emotions and past tantalizingly out of the reader's reach. We who form the legions of his fans know the acute intelligence of his observation, the lyrical surprises of his language and the compassion that tempers his sense of justice, but where those qualities came from, what formed Archer's compelling voice, remain hidden. The great unsolved mystery of the Archer novels is Archer himself.

For many years, the same might have been said of his creator. Ross Macdonald, of course, was not even his real name. It was the nom de plume of Kenneth Millar, born in Los Gatos, California, in 1915 and raised and educated in Canada. Many of Macdonald's fans know a few general facts about his life -- his scholarly background, his marriage to writer Margaret Millar, his mentoring of other writers, his long residence in the genteel town of Santa Barbara, his environmental and anti-war activism in the 1970s, his death in 1983 after several years' slide into Alzheimer's disease.

In Ross Macdonald: A Biography, journalist Tom Nolan takes his cue from Archer, searching for the meaning of Macdonald's life in his past. It is a story as full of betrayal, madness, struggle, loss and redemption as any of its subject's novels. As Archer always did, Nolan digs up the past for a reason, not just to expose it but to illuminate the writer's work. This biography is a balance of investigation and understanding that Archer himself might have been proud of.

Ross Macdonald the famous writer had a reputation as a dignified, gentlemanly sort, brilliant but modest and even shy. Kenneth Millar's life began a long way from the sunny streets of Santa Barbara, and his childhood was as bleak and shadowed as that of many of his characters. John Macdonald "Jack" Millar and Annie Moyer, both Canadians, met and married in Alberta, where she was a nurse and he worked variously as a miner, newspaper editor and sea captain. Kenneth was their only child, born after three stillbirths. Annie was a hard-working Christian Scientist, Jack a freewheeling atheist with a short attention span for jobs. They separated by the time Kenneth was four, a desertion that marked him for life, and he had little contact with his father afterward.

Things took a downward spiral after that. Annie moved around, shifting Kenneth from one relative to another, often so broke she took the boy with her to beg on the streets. Her health, both mental and physical, began to fail. By the time Kenneth was six, she was in such dire straits she prepared to turn him over to an orphanage. At the last minute, he was sent to live with a second cousin whose family gave him a loving, stable home.

It was a rare idyll in his childhood. A couple of years later, Kenneth was sent back to his mother to share her increasingly desperate life. He learned young to cope with mental illness as his mother's grip on reality grew more tenuous. Before his teens, he was drinking, stealing and having sex with other boys.

At 11, he was sent to live with his father's sister, who changed his life by enrolling him for a couple of years in a good private school, where he found recognition and purpose as an exceptional student. Throughout his teens, as he bounced around Canada, he stayed in school and kept his grades up even as he led a shadow life.

In Kitchener, in a pool hall and gambling parlor, he picked up a novel by Dashiell Hammett and read most of it right there, standing up amid the slot machines and billiard tables. He wrote later, "Like iron filings magnetized by the book in my hands, the secret meanings of the city began to organize themselves around me." He didn't know it then, but he had found his calling.

By the time he was 16, he had lived in 50 different places. His father died that year after a series of strokes, leaving him a small inheritance that enabled him to go to Waterloo College. His college career, though marred by his mother's death of a brain tumor when he was 21, was a dazzling success, and he left his teenage vices behind him, it seems, by sheer force of will. His dissertation on Coleridge was praised as one of the finest ever written at the University of Michigan. By the time he finished it, he had already published seven detective novels.

Even before he got to graduate school, at the University of Western Ontario, he hooked up with a high school crush, Margaret Sturm. Another brilliant student and aspiring writer, she had suffered a breakdown after her own mother's death, a mild schizophrenic episode followed by a suicide attempt. Just two years after his mother's death, Millar and Margaret were married.

As Nolan describes it, theirs was an unusual marriage, sometimes warmly supportive, often competitive, occasionally combative. She became successful as a writer well before he did, then, as his books grew more acclaimed, her career faded. The crux of their relationship was their daughter, Linda, who herself might be a character out of a Lew Archer novel.

Conceived by accident -- neither of the Millars wanted a child because they feared passing on the mental illness on both sides of the family -- she showed signs of emotional problems almost from babyhood and by adolescence was drinking heavily. She was probably the driver in a fatal hit-and-run in Santa Barbara during her teens and she drew public attention when she disappeared from her college dorm, sending her father on an Archer-like quest to track her down, which he finally did in Reno. She later married, had a son and found some measure of stability, only to die of a "cerebral incident" in her sleep at 31.

Nolan does a skillful job of presenting those facts of Macdonald's life as profound influences on his work. The devastating losses of his father and his daughter, his interest in psychology from both scholarly and personal angles, his juggling act of a marriage, his lifelong study of literary form and style -- all of them are clearly factors that shaped the novels.

Nolan is also fine on Macdonald's relationships with other writers. All his life, Macdonald was compared with Raymond Chandler, and most people assumed Chandler had been a mentor or at least a model. In fact, early in Macdonald's career, Chandler had ungraciously (or perhaps jealously) criticized Macdonald's books as pretentious and imitative. Macdonald could acknowledge Chandler's influence objectively, but personally he never forgave the slap.

A happier writerly relationship was his mutual admiration society of two with Eudora Welty, whose admiring review of "Underground Man" for the New York Times Book Review was one of the high points of Macdonald's career. Their affection grew, Nolan suggests, into something of a romance in the years before Macdonald was cruelly claimed by Alzheimer's.

A writer's books are not his life, of course, and his life is not the same as the transformed pieces of it that may appear in his fiction. But this cleanly written, meticulously researched and thoughtful biography of Ross Macdonald lets us understand and appreciate the writer Macdonald, the man Millar and the character Archer more fully.

As always, this and other titles reviewed in Colette's List may be purchased at a significant discount from The Bookstall.

Colette's Archive

Colette's List 1: Hiaasen: Murder Under The Palms

Colette's List 2: Hall, MacDonald & More Murder

Colette's List 3: Crews: The Artist As Scar Lover

Colette's List 4: Mosley: Easy In The City Of Angels

Colette's List 5: Chandler: Trouble Is My Business

Colette's List 6: Mango, Mortal Sin & Margaritaville

Colette's List 7: A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Colette's List 8: The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.

Colette's List 9: Spenser Is Parker, Only Taller

Colette's List 10: Tony Hillerman: The Navajo Way

Colette's List 11: Small Towns, Mean Streets

Colette's List 12: James Lee Burke: Blood On The Bayou

Colette's List 13: Rick Harsch: Rust Belt Noir

Colette's List 14: Harrison: A Novel Worth Waiting For

Colette's List 15: Kingsolver: Power & Its Price

Colette's List 16: Macdonald: Secret Lusts & Terrible Revenge

Colette's List 17: Creating Colette: A Scandal In Paris

Colette's List 18: Rushdie: Shake, Rattle & Roll

Colette Bancroft, a writer known at various times in her career to date as The Goddess of the Classroom, The Empress of Haute Cuisine and The Spitball Queen, is at work on a mystery novel of her own. She is an editor on the Metro Desk at the St. Petersburg Times.

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