TOUGH BUT TRUE TO HIS FORM

Santa Barbara book dealer Ralph B. Sipper not long ago gathered together some pieces by and about his friend, the late detective story writer Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar), and published them as “Inward Journey” (Cordelia Editions, Santa Barbara, $25).

The lovely title is from another of Macdonald’s friends and admirers, Eudora Welty: “It is our inward journey that leads us through time--forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling.”

Time, and the erratic but inexorable links between dark past and troubled present, were crucial in most of Macdonald’s mysteries. Lew Archer’s quests were less for smoking guns and latent fingerprints than for the scar tissue of ancient wounds and sad betrayals, the later legacies of broken families and sundered relationships.

One of the appreciations in the book is by Robert B. Parker, creator of the Boston private eye Spenser. Parker probably now comes as close to Macdonald in his approach to the form as anyone I’m aware of. Like Macdonald’s Lew Archer, Spenser seems a man on a journey toward ever more compassion, the wisecracks modulating toward worry and anger over the innocent despoiled.

“All of us who glean where Macdonald reaped begin where he began,” Parker wrote, “with the vision of a man rooted in romance, a man with mythic potential, capable of cruelty when necessary and compassion when possible, hard, isolate, stoic, and unavoidably upon occasion, a killer. Macdonald invigorated that hero. . . . “

Parker is the ‘70s and ‘80s as Macdonald was the ‘50s and ‘60s. The pace is more urgent, the world even more worn and sordid, Spenser more the head-bashing activist than the observer Archer became. But authors and their protagonists are linked by visions of honor, and I hope the Spenser television pilot being done with Robert Urich will preserve the humor and the sensitivity and not make Spenser just another tough guy with a gun and a map of mean streets.

Beyond the books themselves, Macdonald/Millar wrote about the detective story more eloquently than anyone in his time. He was its principal philosopher-advocate, and Sipper has included two previously unpublished essays in “Inward Journey.”

One is the transcript of a talk Macdonald recorded at the University of Michigan in 1954, called “The Scene of the Crime.” It is long and provocative, not only on the detective story as a potential carrier of social truth but on popular art seen for what it has been (Poe, Dickens, Kipling, the most accessible Faulkner) and what Macdonald thought it was failing to be.

“The big magazines whose factual material is so often interesting seem to edit their fiction for victims of adult infantilism or frustrated addicts of mechanical wish fulfillment,” Macdonald wrote.

A degraded popular art, he added, threatened to leave the man in the street “without any real assistance in coordinating the deep and flashing insights into the human condition which every normal man experiences and which true popular art has always embodied. . . . We are all victims, willing or unwilling, of a civilization in which minds and their products are bought and sold.”

But Macdonald was not a bleak pessimist: “The fabric of a society is still woven of little individual acts of will and strands of intention. Our individual acts of will and threads of thought can change the overall pattern in the long run, especially when they are the thoughts and acts of intellectuals and artists.”

The other article is a fascinating letter, thoughtful and furious in equal parts, that Macdonald wrote to his hard-cover publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, when Pocket Books wanted to reprint “Meet Me at the Morgue” but retitle it “The Convenient Corpse” and have Macdonald rewrite parts of it to pep it up and give it harder edges, more like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler.

Acknowledging his debts to both, Macdonald in the letter declared his independence from them. “I am interested in doing things which neither of them was willing or able to do.”

Chandler’s vision of good and evil he found “conventional to the point of old-maidishness” and “anti-human to the point of sadism.”

His own subject, Macdonald told Knopf, was human error, his interest the exploration of lives. “The old-fashioned hard-boiled mystery, with many guns and fists and fornications, has been ruined by its own practitioners, including Chandler. Spillane pulled the plug.”

Granted, Macdonald said, he offered no gangsters, his murders were few and offstage, his villains in the present book “a pathetic old psychoneurotic and a trapped housewife,” his hero “sexually diffident, ill-paid and not very sure of himself.” All Macdonald offered was “real depth and moral excitement.”

Macdonald was the gentlest of tough-minded men, and it is wonderful to hear him standing his ground. He didn’t do the rewrites, and although Macdonald didn’t care one way or the other about the title, it stayed.

Like all Macdonald’s books, it bears rereading, reflecting its own time but speaking powerfully to later time. Cordelia Editions is at 903 State St., Santa Barbara, Calif. 93101.