A vision beyond the private eye

THE author known as Ross Macdonald -- real name, Kenneth Millar (1915-83) -- worked hard for what he achieved, and what he achieved, in a 30-year career that took him from obscurity to the cover of Newsweek, was remarkable. Recognized by critics as the successor to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and a culminating figure in the American hard-boiled tradition, he was also viewed as a peer by such mainstream literary writers as Reynolds Price, Elizabeth Bowen, Thomas Berger and Eudora Welty. Living in and writing about Southern California, Macdonald became a major author of the Golden State -- the third recipient (after Wright Morris and Wallace Stegner) of the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Kirsch Award for work centered on the American West. As for his detective fiction -- 24 novels, 18 featuring an L.A. private investigator named Lew Archer -- its artistic merit and bestselling success set the standard for a generation of genre authors.

The culture has been a bit neglectful of Macdonald’s work since his death from Alzheimer’s disease in Santa Barbara 22 years ago. But now Michael Kreyling, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University and author of “Understanding Eudora Welty,” does much to redress that neglect with “The Novels of Ross Macdonald,” a stimulating examination by a first-rate critical intelligence of the books that William Goldman (in the New York Times Book Review) described as “the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.” Kreyling reasserts Goldman’s claim, calling Macdonald “the foremost author of the detective novel in American literature.” And he expands it: “As a body of work, the Archer novels stand as one of the most illustrious achievements in American novel writing.”

Kreyling analyzes that achievement in eight engrossing chapters, in which he sorts Macdonald’s books chronologically but also in groups “bundled with different thematic twine.” Kreyling warns a reader that he will discuss these works not as a secrets-keeping reviewer of detective stories but as an analyzer of novels -- so “[b]e prepared to be told whodunit.” Best then to read the novels under discussion beforehand, if you wish to avoid what mystery buffs call “spoilers.” Best too to be wary of a handful of factual errors sprinkled through the biographical passages of this narrative. For instance: St. John’s, the private school attended by the Canadian-raised Millar, was in Winnipeg, not Medicine Hat; and after Millar’s daughter disappeared for 10 days in 1959, she was found not in Los Angeles but in Reno.

Such lapses, though regrettable, detract not a bit from the overall achievement of Kreyling’s superb work. He nicely demonstrates how the sorrows of young Millar (the only child of an emotionally beleaguered mother and a father who deserted the family) became the substance of Macdonald’s tales: “[S]pinning lead into gold in his Archer novels,” Kreyling writes, “Macdonald transformed a truly unhappy childhood into the foundation for his fiction.” He’s also very good at showing how Millar, while a graduate student at the University of Michigan and with the help of such brilliant teachers as W.H. Auden, gleaned patterns and insights for his later private-eye novels from the works of Kierkegaard, Coleridge and Kafka.

With clarity and wit, the author describes how a novice Macdonald, in his early books -- such as 1949’s “The Moving Target” and 1950’s “The Drowning Pool” -- grappled with the legacy of his predecessors Hammett and Chandler, in an intense effort to find a style of his own (“He struggled with his forerunners as Jacob struggled with the angel -- for his very name and standing”).

From the first, this socially conscious and psychologically inclined novelist forged a different path from his more overtly hard-boiled colleagues. In Macdonald’s stories, Kreyling notes, “Finding out who did it is not as important as finding out how many willful and accidental accomplices there were, and how far back in the history of a doomed family the evil began.” As Macdonald’s skills and confidence increased, his investigator became more and more in tune with the postwar zeitgeist: “Archer was increasingly meeting clients who needed an analyst as much as, or more than, they needed a private detective. In hindsight it seems inevitable that the decade of the 1950s would make or break Archer and Macdonald. The audience was ready, the cultural mood was right, and Macdonald had the tools.”

Kreyling’s most dazzling chapters explicate Macdonald’s last nine novels, from 1962’s “The Zebra-Striped Hearse” to “The Blue Hammer” of 1976. In his consummate ‘60s books, Kreyling writes, “Having grown out of conventional crime and into the thicket of family pathology, Macdonald pushed the family and its pathologies into the spotlight of the detective novel,” with the result that “the family romance in Macdonald’s creative hands became a sensitive instrument in the examination of an entire social moment.” And Macdonald, Kreyling concludes (weaving pertinent references throughout to such other West Coast artists as Joan Didion and the Beach Boys), was the novelist of that moment, his books “reflecting a civilization in crisis, imploding from the weight of too much dream and not enough reality.”

In the final three novels of the 1970s, Kreyling shows, Macdonald worked to symbolize and dramatize not only the expiration of the golden myth of California but also the conclusion of the Archer saga (“an ongoing philosophical work”) and even the novelist’s own eventual end: “ ‘The Underground Man’ (1971), ‘Sleeping Beauty’ (1973), and ‘The Blue Hammer’ (1976) are apocalyptic novels obsessed with endings. The first two are centered on catastrophic events, a fire and an oil spill, which threaten to bring an end to the especially fragile and beautiful natural California.... ‘The Blue Hammer’ was written by a man sensing unmistakable intimations of his own mortality. In ‘The Blue Hammer’ artists die but the world goes on.”

Yet in the face of personal erasure, the novelist, Kreyling finds, turned his last bow into a muted triumph -- drawing on the valedictory spirit of early-influence Coleridge to bring his fiction cycle full circle. “Coleridge’s late poem ‘Work without Hope’ (1826)

Macdonald, Kreyling has elsewhere observed, “was as serious as any critic drawn to his work.” Surely here is as serious, articulate and exhilarating a critic as Macdonald himself might have wanted. *

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From The Novels of Ross Macdonald

PARTS of the mythology with which Millar surrounded his own father, especially the “radical philosophy” that linked him (in the son’s imagination) with [Dashiell] Hammett, come into play in “Blue City.” As in Hammett’s works, the fault line in civic honor runs through its official custodians, the police: some are good and some not so good. Above the dividing line, virtue gives out and power corrupts; below the line, virtue is where you find it.