The Macdonald case

The third figure in the holy trinity of American crime writing, along with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald was actually Canadian in his upbringing. Which may be credited (or blamed) for his more nuanced development of the hard-boiled style.

Not that he's any softie. If anything, Macdonald is tougher as a writer because he unflinchingly goes into the deeper causes of his characters' predicaments.

You know how in a Hammett or Chandler tale an emotional relationship is revealed at the heart of a case—a tough guy's in love with a scheming dame, a rich daddy protects the offspring he knows is no good, a sleuth holds loyalty to his friend higher than personal gain? And you accept it, maybe even admire it, as part of the code, but you don't really believe that's the way the world works? Well, when Macdonald's Lew Archer kicks over the rocks, you really believe what he finds there.

For thrillers, Macdonald's novels generally start off low-keyed, even laidback, and Archer works the cases without heroics. He's no superman or tough guy throwing his weight or firepower around. In fact, he usually ends up on the wrong end of any fisticuffs. He's a fairly ordinary man who works his cases by accumulating information through patience and figuring out his subjects, until he's deep into a dark mystery at the heart of a family or community.

Ken came up with his Archer in his fifth novel, The Moving Target (1949), which borrowed from Hammett and Chandler. It was followed by The Drowning Pool (1950), which developed the character and narrative style further. For these books he adopted the nom-de-plum of "John Macdonald" and then (to differentiate himself from crime writer John D. MacDonald) "John Ross Macdonald". They're terrific mysteries in the Hammett-Chandler tradition but introducing a new more easy-going detective avatar for the postwar era and they proved quite successful. They were later adapted into movies starring Paul Newman (though the sleuth's surname was changed to Harper in the films).

Another fifteen Archer novels were to follow, but the Millar family drama also continued. The Millars' troublesome sixteen-year-old daughter caused a fatality while driving their car and her parents tried to shield her from criminal proceedings, causing a scandal in Santa Barbara. Many blamed the parents' sordid writing subjects for the daughters' problems.

Ken himself, who is thought to have tried to commit suicide at least once, underwent Freudian psychoanalysis. "My half-suppressed Canadian years, my whole childhood and youth, rose like a corpse from the bottom of the sea to confront me," Millar is quoted as saying.

Some of the psychological revelations—and even personal details—found their way into his writing. The most significant of these works is The Galton Case (1959), in which Archer traces an elusive character back to a sordid past in "Kingsville", Ontario. The novel also stands as a landmark for its use of psychological insight in crime fiction, although it was not immediately recognized as such.

It was only in the 1960s with television and movies taking an interest in his books that "Ross Macdonald", as he was now called, began to receive his due acclaim as more than a genre writer. His personal and family dramas continued, but he turned out novels to good reviews and sales. Among them are the classic mysteries The Goodbye Look (1969) and The Underground Man (1971). The latter uses details from Millar's real-life fight to save his home from a forest fire and, reflecting a growing concern of his, bears a strong ecological message. It was made into a TV movie in 1974, starring Peter Graves as Archer. Both Millars were active in the protests against the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, which features in Sleeping Beauty (1973).

— Eric