ROSS MACDONALD and MARGARET MILLAR
Ross Macdonald was the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar (December 13, 1915 - July 11, 1983), California-born, Canada-raised, eventually returning to California to work hard and slowly to become a preeminent mystery/detective novelist so good, so accomplished that he is now considered a significant voice in 20th Century American literature. Although influenced by the great detective writers in the generation before him, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Macdonald forged a style of his own out of the postwar pulps. His awareness and sophisticated understanding of literary history and tropes (he had a doctorate in literature) and his interest in psychology provided a firm foundation for his use of the detective form to investigate human relationships, conflicts, and tragedies. He wrote stand-alone novels (we have three here), but his great and lasting creation was Lew Archer, a man whose perspective and voice sustains the reader through 18 novels and many short stories. Macdonald is also a keen observer of Californian (and American) culture, documenting in good style a time and place and people.
His wife, Margaret Millar (1915-1994), wrote many fine novels of psychological suspense, and I include her work here as a measure of their marriage, their partnership, and their mutual influence. Of interest also is Macdonald’s deep friendship with Eudora Welty, another master of a region and a people. A volume of their letters is included here.
Three Novels of the Early 1960s: The Zebra-Striped Hearse | The Chill | The Far Side of the Dollar
Three Novels of the Early 1960s: The Zebra-Striped Hearse | The Chill | The Far Side of the Dollar
In 1949 Kenneth Millar, then writing as John Macdonald, published his first novel featuring private detective Lew Archer, inaugurating what The New York Times would call “the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.” By the early 1960s Millar’s nom de plume had changed and the series had evolved steadily toward new levels of emotional depth and structural ingenuity. The name Ross Macdonald had become a byword for a new standard in crime fiction.
The three novels collected in this volume represent for many readers the summit of Macdonald’s art. They remain thrilling for their searing psychological truth-telling, daring flights of narrative invention, and their keenly observed picture of the manners and morals of a particular time and place (Southern California in the early 1960s). The intricate carpentry of their plotting is matched by their passion and imaginative sweep.
Each of these books reflects Macdonald’s enduring concern with the hidden crimes and agonizing dysfunctions that haunt families from one generation to the next. In The Zebra-Striped Hearse, a father’s attempt to protect his daughter from “the complete and utter personal disaster” of marriage to a troubled drifter sends Archer on a perplexing and increasingly bloody trail that leads him from Mexico to Lake Tahoe and finally into the maze of a tragically splintered identity.
In The Chill, perhaps Macdonald’s most perfectly accomplished novel, the search for a young bride gone missing uncovers a succession of seemingly unrelated crimes committed over a period of decades, as Archer finds himself “a ghost from the present haunting a bloody moment in the past.” Macdonald relentlessly strips away his characters’ denials and delusions to reveal a core of violently twisted emotion.
Another hunt for a missing person—this time a young man escaped from an elite reform school—provides the impetus for The Far Side of the Dollar, which Macdonald’s friend Eudora Welty considered “securely among your strongest and best ones . . . a beauty that just gets better.” The book’s cunningly constructed puzzles work intricate variations on the bonds between parent and child, uncovering multiple layers of deception and distortion along the way to the stunning revelations: “Everything is connected with everything else. The problem is to find the connections.”
Tom Nolan, editor, is the author of Ross Macdonald: A Biography and the editor of The Archer Files and, with Suzanne Marrs, Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald.
This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.