Gumshoe Master

This is, surprisingly, the first full-length biography of novelist Ross Macdonald, who died from complications of Alzheimer’s in 1983 at age 67. He had in 18 books taken the hard-boiled private eye tradition he inherited from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and extended it deep into the terrain of literary fiction.

The book comes not a moment too soon. Perhaps because his Lew Archer novels broke away from works of “more flamboyant style and more inflammatory imagination” (as Sue Grafton says in her introduction), Macdonald today appears to be less read and discussed than he deserves to be. It is time, as Grafton says, “for a renewed appreciation of the man and his achievement.”

The author, Tom Nolan, is a former columnist for Los Angeles magazine and presently the reviewer of crime fiction for the Wall Street Journal. The book has occupied him for the better part of a decade and is demonstrably a labor of loving insight and celebration, yet it is unblinkingly candid about the complexities and contradictions of Macdonald, the sometimes vexing nature of his marriage to Margaret Millar and the trouble-strewn life of their only child, Linda, who died at 31.

His real name was Kenneth Millar, and although he was born in California (Los Gatos), he was raised in Canada by a succession of relatives after his father deserted the family when the boy was 6. He did not become Ross Macdonald until his 12th novel, choosing to drop Millar because his wife was publishing mysteries before he did. He laterdropped the John from John Ross Macdonald after protests from John D. MacDonald. (When he wrote his publisher about the change, he had to distance himself even further from the capital D MacDonald by adding that “his writing fails to improve with time, I’m afraid.”)

Not least among the durable and affecting elements of the Lew Archer novels is the degree to which Macdonald could be felt to be transmuting his life into fiction. Novels, Macdonald said, “are built, like Robinson Crusoe’s cabin, out of the flotsam of the author’s past and his makeshift present. A man’s fiction, no matter how remote it may seem to be from the realistic or the autobiographical, is very much the record of his particular life.”

In an often-quoted line, he also said, “We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on the broken locks, our voice prints in the bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete and the blowing sand.” (Macdonald was not only the most poetic of the private eye novelists, he was poetic and sharply perceptive on the subject of detective fiction. Although he thought Chandler had limitations, for example, Macdonald generously said that “he wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.”)

Nolan comments that the then-unusual thematic elements Macdonald brought to the mystery included questions of personal identity, the family secret, the family scapegoat, childhood trauma and, perhaps above all, “the way the buried past rises like a skeleton to confront the present.”

Macdonald later counted that he had lived in 50 rooms by the time he finished high school, a mobility that would itself qualify as childhood trauma. The search for a father, for a family, for a past, is the most common theme in his Lew Archer novels. In his fiction he revealed, Nolan says, “an aching loneliness” and “a lifetime of anger, fear and regret.” He was sexually precocious (experiences at age 8) and was often on the borderline of trouble. Looking back, Macdonald guessed that he could all too easily have become a criminal.

He became an academic instead, getting a doctorate at the University of Michigan with a thesis on Coleridge (an author whose influence Nolan traces in the novels) and intending to teach if he failed at becoming a writer.

He had published three novels before he introduced Lew Archer. He and Maggie were living in Santa Barbara, which she had discovered while he was still in the Navy and she was writing for Warner Bros. Archer was not an immediate hit, and sales rose slowly, despite a supportive publisher. Indeed, the Millars had 20 lean-budget years before 1969, the year of his big breakout.

That year, in a front-page review in the New York Times, novelist William Goldman called the Archer books “the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American” (a quote not likely ever to disappear from paperback covers). Critic John Leonard wrote that Macdonald was “a writer of detective novels turned into a major American novelist.” In the Los Angeles Times, the late columnist Art Seidenbaum wrote that “Macdonald’s books are full of the wandering hungers of California people, the men who embezzle dreams and then keep running, the women who fade toward old age still thinking about 40-foot pools in San Marino.”

A dozen years before the wide acclaim (Newsweek put him on the cover in 1971), Macdonald had written his editor prophetically, “the mystery and the novel are tending to merge. . . . The tendency in the mystery is definitely towards the literary, the psychological, the non-athletic, the detective story. My book [‘The Doomsters’] is intended to close off an era in the ‘hard-boiled’ field.” Supremely confident, he added, “I’m beginning to trace concentric circles around those fine old primitives [Hammett and Chandler].”

The hard-boiled field is far from deserted these days, although the significant trend in the last two or three decades has been the appearance of the female private eye, who is not so much hard-boiled as soft-centered and caring beneath a tough and resilient exterior. The breed, pioneered by Marcia Muller in San Francisco, has Grafton and Sara Paretsky among its prominent practitioners and includes Patricia Cornwell, with a female medical examiner as her series character.

Yet the shift is not simply away from the hard-boiled tone. Macdonald said of Lew Archer, “While he is a man of action, his actions are largely directed to putting together the stories of other people’s lives and discovering their significance. He is less a doer than a questioner, a consciousness in which the meanings of other people’s lives emerge. This gradually developed conception of the detective hero as the mind of the novel is not wholly new, but it is probably my chief contribution.”

Indeed, Macdonald pioneered the characterization of the gumshoe as a person of feelings as well as of action, capable of anguish, as Archer was, weeping at the discovery of a teenager’s corpse in the trunk of a car. With Macdonald, the writer had become a sensitive social historian as well as an entertainer. Though Macdonald had private insecurities, he knew his work would “be read in a hundred years.” In Grafton’s view, “He gave the genre its current respectability, generating a worldwide readership that has paved the way for us who follow in his footsteps.”

Nolan’s minutely researched, eloquent and definitive critical biography makes movingly clear how significant those footsteps were.