“I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I’m still going through the motions.”
He is also a talented blues guitarist, a tactile artist who has been featured in galleries, and has earned a Master's degree in theology. I once pointed out to him that he was as cool as Peter Gunn. He corrected me by saying, "I would prefer to be Johnny Staccato". He has a point.
I value his insight into human nature as it is sometimes rather raw, but tempered with education and intelligence. He doesn't deal with dramatic conspiracies or lurid murders like TV detectives, most often it's with one poor schlub who thought he had the brains and cleverness to outwit a massive, multi-national bank that enjoys near-unlimited resources. It never turns out well.
But, often at the heart of the schlub's series of poor, and ultimately criminal, choices is a complicated web of familial obligations and personal desires. My friend once noted to me that, when caught, criminals always refer to their circumstances in the passive voice, as if things just sort of happened to them with no notion of moral agency. Such is their delusion. His comment reminded me of some of the most literate detective fiction of the 20th century.
Ross MacDonald was the pen name of Kenneth Millar, who was born in California in 1915 and raised in Kitchener, Ontario. After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, MacDonald [we'll use that name for this profile] enrolled in the University of Michigan, eventually earning a PhD in English. During this time, as he was a newlywed, he supplemented his income by writing stories for the pulp magazine market, gradually refining his style and what would become his singular creation.
In 1949, MacDonald wrote his first novel, The Moving Target, featuring private detective Lew Archer, a quintessential, hard-boiled Southern Californian private eye; a direct descendant of Dashiell Hammett's "Sam Spade" and Raymond Chandler's "Philip Marlowe". In fact, the three characters are recognized by scholars as the trinity of world-weary, but valuable, ethical voices in the midst of moral chaos.
Sam Spade presented a singular ethical sense that was contrary to the chaos of a criminalized world. While a remarkable collection of villains is searching for an elusive object of desire, and cheating, stealing, coercing, kidnapping, and killing in order to gain it, Spade is following his own moral voice as he seeks the murderer of his business partner. The fact that he didn't care for his partner, was having an affair with his partner's wife, and Spade's new love interest is one of the grasping villains, does not dissuade him in his pursuit of some resolute moral action.
Philip Marlowe is essentially a monk. Well, a monk who carries a revolver and has a taste for whiskey and sadder-but-wiser women. He enjoys chess, literature, and a sophisticated philosophical outlook on his morally cloudy world. In fact, his name is inspired by that of Christopher Marlowe, an Elizabethan playwright and poet who was a deft hand with a sword, a secret agent for Elizabeth I, and probably assassinated by her enemies. Or by her. One could never tell with Liz as she could be fickle in her affections.
Lew Archer is such a continuation of the other two that he may as well have been their business partner, at least originally. After a few novels, Archer's role in detective fiction began to evolve with the times. As Spade was a product of the late 1920's and 1930's, and Marlowe of the 1940's, Archer's fictional tenure would range from the post-WWII period to the early 1970's. Where the Chandler novels are often about the moral development of Marlowe, MacDonald's Archer novels become over time observations of human relations, dysfunction, unrequited devotion, and nihilistic narcissism.
In order to record such observations, rather than being about the detective's moral pilgrimage, the character of Archer becomes the synoptic through whom we view the changing moral landscape of the post-war period. Thus, he is more empathetic than Marlowe or, certainly, Spade, and implicitly more sensitive to those with whom he interacts. As Spade and Archer were characters from an urban landscape, one often fraught with unknown and sudden danger, Archer would find himself more and more often in the suburban valley communities outside of Los Angeles, where the danger was even less visible and more nebulous, if no less real.
MacDonald would work with devotion and seriousness at his craft, clearly with the intention of turning the detective fiction born from the pulp magazines, where the characters of Hammett and Chandler also began, into a proper literary form. Much of this required not only traditional features of detective fiction, with well-reasoned and balanced plots, but the lyricism of the writing needed to be of a near-sublime quality, too.
Consider these selected sentences from the Archer novels:
“There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.”
― The Drowning Pool
“She was trouble looking for somebody to happen to.” ― The Wycherly Woman
“The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers.” ― The Instant Enemy
“People are trying so hard to live through their children. And the children keep trying so hard to live up to their parents, or live them down. Everybody's living through or for or against somebody else. It doesn't make too much sense, and it isn't working too well.” ― The Far Side of the Dollar
Eudora Welty, a writer whose observations of small scenes in southern life earned her a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and various other literary honors, recognized what MacDonald was doing with detective fiction and engaged in a lively correspondence with him that reveals through their exchanges a shared notion of what was possible in his genre of fiction. Each encouraged the other, with MacDonald leading Welty to the more visceral and Welty developing in MacDonald a greater sense of nuance in his characters' actions and interactions.[1]
The letters, over 300 of them, may be found in a bound volume that's still in print.(2)
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| MacDonald and Welty in one of their rare, in-person visits |
MacDonald would succumb to Alzheimer's Disease in 1983 at the age of 68. Many current mystery writers, especially the recently deceased Sue Grafton, would credit MacDonald as serving as inspiration for their own works.
As was noted by MacDonald's biographer [3],
"By any standard he was remarkable. His first books, patterned on Hammett and Chandler, were at once vivid chronicles of a postwar California and elaborate retellings [sic] of Greek and other classic myths. Gradually he swapped the hard-boiled trappings for more subjective themes: personal identity, the family secret, the family scapegoat, the childhood trauma; how men and women need and battle each other, how the buried past rises like a skeleton to confront the present. He brought the tragic drama of Freud and the psychology of Sophocles to detective stories, and his prose flashed with poetic imagery."
