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mong much else in Ross Macdonald’s (i.e., Kenneth Millar’s) long and short fiction featuring detective Lew Archer, fans can pleasurably anticipate the appearance of seen-better-days motels and motor courts the likes of Topanga Court, “a collection of peeling stucco buildings huddled between the Pacific Coast Highway and the eroding cliff” (Sleeping Beauty); seen-better-days desk clerks, the likes of which wear badly fitting “brown toupees,” their eyes “glazed and solemn with stupidity” (The Zebra-Striped Hearse); stopovers at Archer’s Los Angeles office on Sunset to browse neglected mail and unpaid bills; famished, forgot-to-eat breakfast feeds of steak and eggs; unconsciousness delineated (“I swung in black space . . . realized with some embarrassment that the body on the deck belonged to me . . . climbed air down to it and crawled back in, a rat who lived in a scarecrow,” The Barbarous Coast); nightmares revisited (“I was due to arrive someplace . . . but when I went out to my car it had no wheels,” The Underground Man); unwelcome mirror reminders (“I looked like a ghost from the present haunting a bloody moment in the past,” The Chill); California truisms (“The wet pavements were almost empty of people, as they always were when it rained in California,” The Far Side of the Dollar); America truisms (“Like most Americans, I was a counter-puncher,” Instant Enemy); the aging of dreams and the bodies that were supposed to live them; generational damage and guilt (“The current of guilt flowed in a closed circuit if you traced it far enough,” The Doomsters); and, most reliably, evocative descriptions of California’s oceanic neighbor, which Coleridge scholar Millar preferred to call “the sea.”

The sea, as Millar writes it and Archer perceives it, serves as border, soundtrack, eyewitness, trysting locale, body dumpster, mood reflector, a sight-and-sound reminder of the unknown and unknowable, its vastness, moment by moment, putting mere land dwellers in their minuscule universal place. “The cab turned off U.S. 101 in the direction of the sea” begins The Moving Target, the first of the Archer novels, and in the seventeen Archer novels that followed, the Pacific maintains its primacy and its “changing blue mystery” (Black Money), winking, wrinkling, glaring, roaring under cottages, sucking at pilings, its waters “paved . . . with broken moonlight” (The Wycherly Woman), its waves rising like “apparitions” (The Barbarous Coast), rolling like “measured installments of eternity” (The Blue Hammer) to shores where sunbathers “lie around in the sand like bodies after a catastrophe” (The Zebra-Striped Hearse).

Murderers and their victims come and go; the Pacific remains, Lew Archer’s constant companion and frequent point of comparison as the detective seeks to unravel tawdry truth. From the story “The Sinister Habit”: “Past his narrow cormorant skull I could see the sky and the sea, wide and candid, flecked with the purity of sails. I spent too much of my time trying to question liars in rented rooms.” From the story fragment “Stolen Woman”: “I closed my eyes and deliberately rolled over with my face to the wall, telling myself that it was just the sea. I’d been in the beach house for less than a week, and I wasn’t used to the constant sound of it.”

A California native who came of age in Canada, Kenneth Millar bonded early with the ocean. In 1919, his Canadian father, John Macdonald Millar, moved the family back to Canada and that same year took his four-year-old son on a boat ride that introduced a “shining oceanic world,” Millar disclosed in Self-Portrait, a collection of criticism and autobiographical sketches. “The Pacific . . . always lapped like blue eternity at the far edge of my life.” In 1946, a father himself, Millar reversed his earlier journey, resettling in California with his wife, the crime novelist Margaret Millar, and their young daughter, Linda. It was Margaret who chose the town of Santa Barbara, and it was Margaret’s book earnings that paid for the Bath Street house, the first of the Millars’ five Santa Barbara residences. Despite the precariousness of the household’s income, the Millars at once joined the Coral Casino Beach and Cabana Club on Channel Drive. It was Kenneth Millar’s daily habit to swim in both the ocean and the Coral’s expansive pool, recreations Richard Moore filmed for his “Writer in America: Ross Macdonald” television documentary. Jill Krementz photographed the trim, wet-haired Millar in plaid bathing trunks, smiling at the camera, dashing along the beach and body surfing on a breaking wave. In Pacific waters, Millar got his “best ideas for books” and often, while swimming “wrote whole paragraphs” (Tom Nolan, Ross Macdonald: A Biography). When Eudora Welty, with whom Millar formed a late-life attachment (“an emotional relationship of great importance,” according to writer Reynolds Price) flew in from Mississippi to keynote the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, Millar met her plane and “in that soft California dark,” in Welty’s phrase, escorted her on a late-night stroll alongside the Pacific (Nolan).

Millar did not settle on Ross Macdonald, the pseudonym that stuck, until 1956 and the publication of his twelfth book and sixth Lew Archer novel. About the character that brought the other writer in the family fame and fortune, Millar wrote: “Throughout its history . . . the detective hero has represented his creator and carried his values into action in society . . . I wasn’t Archer, exactly, but Archer was me” (Self-Portrait). Nearer the end of his writing career, he offered a slightly different take on the conjunction, musing that Archer could “possibly” be an “imaginary self-portrait . . . a shadow portrait,” the “basic difference” being “I sit in a chair and write, and he gets out and acts.” Millar also shared his characterization protocol: “By saying a bit less about a character you can actually tell more” (Paul Nelson and Kevin Avery, It’s All One Case).

The “bit less” Millar supplied for his Archer character includes a rocky youth as “street boy,” “gang-fighter, thief” and “frightened junior-grade hoodlum in Long Beach” (The Doomsters). Archer’s Contra Costa grandmother had wanted him to become a priest; instead, the reformed street boy became a Long Beach cop and married man. Neither job nor marriage lasted. Ex-wife Sue reasonably expected “a husband she could count on to be there” (The Goodbye Look). As a bachelor/detective, Archer presides over a slim bank account, lives in an apartment complex in LA and feeds “his” scrub jays peanuts (The Underground Man). Among those whom he actively dislikes: actors, the rich, those who despoil landscapes and people determined to get what they want no matter the collateral cost. Accused in The Far Side of the Dollar of having “a secret passion for justice,” Archer counters that, no, what drives him is a “secret passion for mercy.” As a day-to-day behavioral guide, Millar’s detective ascribes to: “Never tell anyone more than he needs to know, because he’ll tell somebody else” (The Blue Hammer).

In 1964, Santa Barbara’s Coyote Fire came within a few hundred yards of the Millars’ Chelham Way house. Margaret and the dogs safely evacuated, Millar stayed behind, hosing down the roof, hoping to save their property. The Millars were lucky; a last-minute wind shift sent the fire in another direction and their house, unlike the houses of some of their neighbors, was spared. In The Underground Man, Lew Archer also witnesses an out-of-control conflagration. Millar’s private eye has been privy to shark-nibbled, bullet-ridden, knife-slashed corpses and a full array of the sordid, squalid ravages inflicted upon the living, but only once in the series does Archer admit to “shock,” a reaction to the sight and threat of engulfing flames. “I glanced up at the mountains, and was shocked by what I saw. The fire had grown and spread as if it fed on darkness” (The Underground Man). In that novel, the sixteenth title in the series, biographer Matthew Brucolli discerns an “older and tired” Archer. “Other people’s tragedies have wearied him” (Ross Macdonald). If, as Wendy Lesser posits in Pictures at an Execution, “the murder story must do its best to answer all the answerable questions, and still leave something open or unresolved in the end,” the fictional Archer narratives leave unresolved what is never resolved for humankind: sorrow, regret, the inability to undo what has been done.

The heir apparent to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Millar never lost his respect and admiration for Hammett; Chandler was another matter. How much of the pedestal slippage was precipitated by Chandler’s harsh criticism of Millar’s own work (The Moving Target, Chandler famously quipped, could be used “as a springboard for a sermon on How Not to Be a Sophisticated Writer”) is open to speculation. Millar demoted Chandler for having a “vision” that lacked “the tragic unity of Hammett’s” and considered Chandler’s “The Simple Art of Murder” essay a “not very illuminating” guide to the genre (Self-Portrait). In general, so-called hard-boiled detective fiction on closer examination contained quite a bit of “lyrical” content, Millar argued. “You might call it romanticism of the proletariat,” he explained to a National Observer reporter. Of his own style in particular, he said: “I’m not just interested in a simile for the sake of what it does in the sentence. I’m interested in what it does in terms of the whole book. Some of my similes . . . carry the message of my book better than anything else I write” (Self-Portrait).

Nettled whenever reviewers described his work as “Chandleresque,” Millar believed his literary range “exceeded” Chandler’s. “There’s a whole element in my work which . . . doesn’t appear . . . in Chandler, and that’s the psychological/symbolic aspect of the action and the imagery” (Nelson and Avery). He also believed his series had legs. After turning in his second Archer manuscript, The Drowning Pool, he predicted to editor Alfred Knopf: “I have an idea that Archer as he becomes known will do quite well for us.” He placed a high value on his wife’s work as well. Given the opportunity, Millar extravagantly praised Margaret’s novels, reiterating that he considered her simply “the best in the business” (Bruccoli). Margaret did not repay the compliment. When Diana Cooper-Clark came to Santa Barbara to interview both authors for Designs of Darkness: Interviews with Detective Novelists, Margaret made plain her contempt for the same-detective format, dissing, by implication, the bulk of her husband’s output. Although it might help her sales to feature “the same detective the way Ken has,” she’d be “bloody well bored” by the repetition. “I don’t think you can write many books about a detective without repeating yourself ad nauseam,” Margaret told Cooper-Clark. “It’s a hell of a lot harder to create a new detective every time.”

Marked in its early years by physical violence on both sides, the Millars’ marriage proved to be a difficult, volatile union. Margaret did not disguise her disdain for her husband’s academic ambitions and his pursuit of a doctorate from the University of Michigan, which she considered a waste of time. While he struggled to find his niche, she felt “trapped” by marriage and more so by motherhood (Nolan). They were a couple at odds in the bedroom: he wanted more sex; she, less. They were also a household, first to last, of unequal incomes, a partnership inevitably complicated by acknowledged or unacknowledged feelings of competition, given the impossibility of two writers simultaneously enjoying peak professional success. And then there was their troubled daughter, Linda.

Born in Kitchener, Ontario, the year after her parents married, Linda Jane Millar grew to be a smart, pretty, precocious, willful child and teenager who felt out of place in Santa Barbara and neglected by her famous parents, despite what others perceived as her father’s idealization of and devotion to his daughter. Like many other teenagers, she smoked, drank, had sex and denied she engaged in those pastimes when caught. Curiously, her psychologically astute father insisted that his child never lied and routinely defended her version of events. On a rainy, February night in 1956, driving drunk in the Ford Tudor her father had gifted her, sixteen-year-old Linda struck two thirteen-year-old pedestrians on a Santa Barbara street, killing Ernest Dal Zuffo and severely injuring Michael Perona. Driving on, she smashed into a parked Buick, the second collision flipping her own car. Linda’s subsequent arrest and trial exposed the Millars’ private lives to public scrutiny, ridicule and resentment. The family was accused of receiving preferential treatment from police and courts, Millar and Margaret of being bad parents and alcoholics themselves. Out on bail, Linda slashed her wrists and was soon committed to the State Hospital in Camarillo. After a sentence, with restrictions, of eight years probation, the family fled Santa Barbara for Menlo Park. As did his daughter, Millar saw a therapist in Menlo Park. He described the results of those sessions in terms aquatic: “My half-suppressed Canadian years, my whole childhood and youth, rose like a corpse from the bottom of the sea to confront me” (Self-Portrait). Among the painful memories: his father’s abandonment of the family, his mother’s dire financial situation thereafter, Millar’s last-minute reprieve from life in an orphanage when his father’s cousin agreed to take him in, an unsettled, rootless existence throughout his teens. It was a past that left many scars and a lasting residue of bitterness. Asked in 1976 what he considered to be his “worst” personal characteristic, Millar named “anger in all its forms.” The “structure of any one of my books is a conflict between the rawest forces of life and a very stringent, intellectual control,” he told Paul Nelson. “Is that also true of your own life?” Nelson probed. “I suspect so,” Millar answered (It’s All One Case).

With Linda off to college at UC Davis, Margaret and Millar gave in to their coastal longing and quietly returned to Santa Barbara, renting a house that overlooked the Pacific on Camino de la Luz. It was a short-lived idyll of peace. Once again, for reasons other than novels, the Millar family found themselves in the public eye. On May 30, 1959, Linda failed to return to her dorm by curfew; for more than a week she went missing. A desperate, sleep-deprived Millar personally searched for his daughter, hired detectives, made media appeals for information and direct appeals to his daughter, urging her to come home. Eventually found at a Reno bar, Linda only vaguely remembered what had transpired after parting ways with the two male companions who’d originally accompanied her to Harrah’s casino on the Nevada border. Millar told the Santa Barbara News-Press that he believed his daughter had suffered “some kind of psychic break.” After the ordeal, an exhausted Millar was hospitalized, diagnosed with severe hypertension and heart damage. As soon as he was physically able, he returned to his swimming routine. Linda also regained some measure of equilibrium, married and had a son. But she continued to have struggles with alcohol and needed Seconal to sleep. Following her death at age 31, her parents buried her ashes in Santa Barbara Cemetery, “above the beach where she took her first swim in the Pacific,” her grieving father wrote to a family friend. “She was a strong swimmer in her day.” Without exception, Millar refused to answer questions about Linda in interviews; that no such questions be broached became a precondition of his consent. Even so, the family trauma worked its way into Margaret’s and Millar’s fictions. In the Archer series, The Galton Case, The Chill and most prominently Sleeping Beauty all feature Linda-like characters, lost and unhappy young women who, as Linda had said of herself, “tried” to grow up, but “didn’t do well” (Nolan).

Once Millar hit his stride as a novelist, he typically wrote four hours a day in longhand on a pine writing board held in his lap, seated in a red “imitation leather” armchair that Margaret had bought for him in 1946 (Nelson and Avery). A man once able to recite poetry and lengthy passages of prose in perfect detail, Millar began experiencing memory lapses as early as 1971. In revising Sleeping Beauty, he confused days of the week in the book’s timeline, an error corrected by editors at Knopf. By 1976, the year his eighteenth and final Archer novel, The Blue Hammer, was published, he was repeating entire sentences in his correspondence. In interviews he avoided proper names and the titles of his books, referring to Sleeping Beauty as “my book about the oil spill.” In 1979, to a younger correspondent, Millar turned again to water imagery to explain his plight: “My own personal tides are not as strong and dependable as I would like them to be.” Nevertheless, he continued to grant interviews, the last to Diana Cooper-Clark, conducted at the Coral. “Within five minutes it was absolutely clear something awful was happening,” Cooper-Clark said. “He was doing the best that he could. And it was horrible . . . because he was such a dignified man. It’s like the musician going deaf, the painter going blind.”

Millar was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1981; Margaret made public his condition in a Los Angeles Times article published in 1982. “He knows what’s happening to him most of the time, but he doesn’t really feel things,” she told the reporter. As the person primarily responsible for his care: “I lose my temper and then I go on guilt trips,” she admitted. “The trips aren’t as big as they used to be, but the temper remains the same.” A year before Millar’s death, long put off by Margaret and warned that Millar wouldn’t recognize her, Eudora Welty arrived in Santa Barbara to see “Ken” and judge the situation herself. Despite being “appalled” by what she viewed as Margaret’s insensitive and punitive treatment of Millar and heartbroken by his diminishment, Welty was glad she’d made the effort because “he did know me,” she told Tom Nolan. As Welty watched Millar, aided by a helper, swim laps in the Coral’s pool, she felt grateful that he hadn’t been deprived of everything he loved. He “still remembered how to swim,” she said. And, as ever, swimming “did him good.”