Sleuthing a Man of Mystery

Believe it or not, there was a time when no respectable Harvard graduate would write for a TV sitcom. But that was long ago, before movies featured people doing unspeakable things to their dessert, back when television was disdained as the boob tube and reading mysteries was a habit would-be intellectuals kept to themselves.

The late Kenneth Millar helped change all that, blurring the distinction between high culture and low. Using the pen name Ross Macdonald, Millar (pronounced Miller) wrote mysteries that caused New York critic John Leonard to praise him as “a writer of detective novels turned into a major American novelist.”

In 24 novels, most featuring soulful private eye Lew Archer, Macdonald made the genre safe for writers who believed a mystery could be as insightful, nuanced and lyrical as any other literary form.

Macdonald was 67 when he died in 1983, his powerful intellect destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease. Now Macdonald--who lived in Santa Barbara with his wife and fellow mystery writer, Margaret Millar--is the subject of a much-praised biography by longtime Valleyite Tom Nolan.

The 51-year-old Nolan, who recently forsook Burbank for Glendale, was a fan long before he was Macdonald’s biographer.

“When you read his books, you find these qualities that the others, as fine as they are, don’t have,” says Nolan, comparing Macdonald to lesser mystery writers. Sadness, melancholy and bleak humor are among the qualities that distinguish Macdonald’s novels, says Nolan, whose favorites include “The Chill,” “Sleeping Beauty” and “The Galton Case.”

“All the books in the ‘60s are pretty terrific,” Nolan adds.

Encouraged by L.A. mystery writer Dick Lochte to undertake “Ross Macdonald: A Biography,” Nolan spent nine years on the project. In the past, Nolan read biographies and wondered: “God, how could you possibly take that long to do something?” It’s all clear to him now.

Nolan began his research by plowing through the vast, untapped Kenneth and Margaret Millar Collection at UC Irvine. For a couple of years, Nolan says, he went through the collection “page by page and box by box.” Macdonald, Nolan learned, was a man who had secrets, just as his characters did, and much of the material was not especially revealing.

And, then, as writers sometimes do, Nolan got lucky. Macdonald had kept what he called plot notebooks, jotting down thoughts about novels-in-progress and future projects in spiral-bound notebooks that he carefully preserved. One day, Roger Berry, then head of special collections at the Irvine library, rolled a cart loaded with the notebooks out to where Nolan was working.

“You’ve looked at everything but these,” said Berry, offering the material to Nolan.

There, among the dross, Nolan found a gem--an unusually revealing autobiographical work titled “Notes of a Son and Father.”

“Nobody knew it existed,” Nolan says of the candid memoir. Macdonald had apparently written it (in the third person) in 1956, as he stood watch over his only child, Linda. Macdonald feared that Linda, a troubled teen, might commit suicide after she struck and killed a 13-year-old boy in a hit-and-run accident.

“It was a mind-blower,” Nolan says of the document, which he believes Macdonald wrote in hopes of helping Linda’s legal case (she was charged with two felonies and was ultimately given eight years’ probation).

“This was a private document,” Nolan says of what proved to be the key to Macdonald. In it, Macdonald discussed his Dickensian childhood and his own failures as a father. He also described a series of homosexual encounters in his youth--material that never would have surfaced if he hadn’t chosen to write about it and preserve the record.

In a sense, Macdonald gave Nolan permission to use this and other sensitive material in extensive writing that the scholarly Macdonald did on the subject of writing.

“I was encouraged that he believed in biography and in candid biography and in relating a writer’s life to what he has written,” Nolan says.

“The more I learned about him, the more I admired him. . . . What a strong, splendid person he was.”

At some point, Nolan and his wife, Mary, shared their living room with 30 legal-size cartons of Macdonald material.

“In fact, we got rid of furniture to make room for them,” Nolan recalls.

Even as the project stretched into another year, Nolan never lost faith in it: “I knew he was worth it. I didn’t always know if I was up to it.”

A mean-spirited Raymond Chandler had gone out of his way to bad-mouth Macdonald to important people in publishing. Perhaps as a consequence, in Nolan’s view, Macdonald was unfailingly supportive of talented newcomers, including songwriter Warren Zevon. Many of the more than 200 people Nolan interviewed for the book spoke of Macdonald’s encouragement and kindness.

Oddly, Macdonald’s peers never saw fit to honor him with an Edgar, the mystery writers’ Oscar, although his wife received one in 1955 for “Beast in View.” Macdonald finally won the Mystery Writers of America’s Grandmaster Award in 1974.

If Chandler and others, including Travis McGee creator John D. MacDonald, sniped at Macdonald, he had distinguished patrons as well. Poet W.H. Auden was a suspense buff who encouraged Macdonald to write mysteries when he was still a graduate student at the University of Michigan and Auden was a visitor there. (Macdonald’s doctoral dissertation was on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who left his mark on the novels, Nolan shows.)

Macdonald’s many literary friends and admirers included Eudora Welty. “I can’t write,” he confessed to Welty when his Alzheimer’s was so advanced that Margaret Millar told her there was no point in coming to visit, advice Welty was glad she ignored. Nolan spent four days interviewing Welty at her home in Jackson, Miss., an experience he describes as one of the high points of his life.

Today Sue Grafton, who wrote the preface to Nolan’s book, is Santa Barbara’s most famous mystery writer, and some poor benighted souls have never heard of Ross Macdonald.

Nolan recently sat next to Grafton at a signing at a Westside bookstore. Her proximity resulted, Nolan laughingly recalls, “in the longest line I’ve had to date.”

Spotlight runs each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.