Tracking Lew Archer Reveals
Insights Into California's Soul

By Tom Nolan
Photographs by Todd Masinter

o fiction writer since World War II has written more memorably and insightfully about Southern California than Ross Macdonald, the Santa Barbara author of best-selling mystery novels featuring private detective/narrator Lew Archer. Published between 1949 and 1976, the books have been hailed not only as the best crime fiction of their time but also as works of serious literary merit. "Ross Macdonald is one of the central authors of his time and place," critic George Grella contended in Contemporary Novelists: Third Edition (St. Martin's Press, 1982). "His novels may be the truest of any, in his lifetime, in America."

In the course of that lifetime, the soft-spoken Macdonald became a formidable (if very private) presence on the California literary scene. In 1982, he received the Los Angeles Times's Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement. But the author had written no new novels since 1976's The Blue Hammer, and after his death in 1983 he faded from public consciousness.

Recently, though, there's been much new interest in Macdonald's life and work: full-length radio dramatizations of two Lew Archer books, a major Macdonald biography, and publication this year of three previously unprinted Macdonald novelettes. Now, 25 years after Lew Archer's last case, readers are rediscovering how striking and poetic are Macdonald's descriptions of the Golden State, how piercing his glances into California's tarnished heart.

It was a huge old building, Early Hollywood Byzantine, with stucco domes and minarets, and curved verandahs where famous faces of the silent days had sipped their bootleg rum.

Macdonald (whose real name was Kenneth Millar) was nearly 30 when he first saw Southern California in 1944, when the U.S. Navy posted him to San Diego at the start of his World War II service as a reserve officer. But a part of him had always felt that this was where he was meant to be. He was born in 1915 in Los Gatos, near San Francisco. He was raised in Canada, but his Canadian parents often told him California was a wondrous place of golden light: a paradise to which he should one day return.

The Southern California Ken Millar and his wife, Margaret Sturm Millar (also a crime-fiction novelist), moved to in 1946 was a place of physical beauty and social optimism. On the brink of a postwar boom, California seemed manageable in size and nearly limitless in potential. And Santa Barbara, the town the Millars made their home, offered an especially attractive vantage point from which to witness the region and its natives. Ken Millar immediately began writing stories set there — such as The Bearded Lady, a novelette in which he called his new hometown "San Marcos."

San Marcos was a unique blend of western border town, ocean resort, and artists' colony.

—The Bearded Lady (1948)

In The Moving Target (later the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman hit movie Harper), Millar/Macdonald consciously drew on hard-boiled conventions established by Dashiell Hammett in the late 1920s and early '30s and by Raymond Chandler in the '40s and '50s. So in Target and the next few Lew Archer books (there'd be 18 Archer titles in all), the detective went places a postwar reader would expect an L.A. private eye to visit: Sunset Strip clubs, gangsters' lairs, Malibu bordellos, dope takers' flophouses.

I piloted the ramshackle elevator cage to the third floor and stepped out into an airless corridor. The brown numbered doors stood like upended coffins on each side, bathed in the static red flames of fire exit bulbs that dotted the landing at intervals. 307 was halfway down the corridor to the left.

—The Way Some People Die (1951)

Tarnished Gold, continued

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