Ross MacDonald: Strangers in Town: Three Newly Discovered Mysteries

His love of writing and of music came together in early April when Millar took a break from working on his manuscript to dash off lyrics to "The Stateside Blues," a song he urged amateur-pianist Maggie to put music to; he was sure it had commercial potential.

Freed from the confines of the university and away from the demands of civilian life, Ken Millar's writing impulse expressed itself in all sorts of ways. In April he started a children's book, Seabag, about the Shipley Bay captain's dog, to be illustrated by a young lieutenant on board ("I'd not be averse to doing a series with him — in my spare time"). He sent Margaret detailed notes on how to adapt The Iron Gates as a play; and he concocted a plot for a book he thought she should write, The Waiting House ("big slick material").

All this, as well as the hundreds of letters to Margaret and others, Millar did in-between his shipboard duties, which were fairly demanding.

Ensign Millar was responsible for all coding on the Shipley Bay . One of his jobs was to transport secret materials from ship to shore and back, during which missions he carried a.45 pistol. When the Shipley Bay gave support in battle, communications officer Millar received the radio messages regarding daily changes in battle lines and communicated those to the pilots of the planes served by the carrier.

Millar's own writing was done in cramped and often noisy quarters, in tropical heat that (as the ship shuttled back and forth from Hawaii to Guam) was often sweltering. With the heat at its worst, the ship's walls were painful to touch; and ink wouldn't dry.

Sometimes Millar used an upturned wastebasket as a stool when he wrote in his improvised workspace. When his eight-man room became too boisterous, he asked for transfer back to a two-man compartment below the waterline, in "Torpedo Junction," beneath where the planes were stored.

Millar often felt alienated, politically and culturally, from his shipmates ("The word is inarticulate"); he craved a sort of intellectual stimulation that probably couldn't be found outside the academy. But if there were no other intellectuals on the Shipley Bay, there were several cheerful people able and willing to give Millar practical aid. The captain, a member of the Detective Book Club, loaned him mysteries. A warrant officer with access to legal-toxicology texts provided technical info on poisons which Millar hoped to use in The Long Ride . A Navy public relations man (probably in Honolulu) bought Millar a beer and gave official clearance for his thriller's plot; the p.r. man was a former editorial assistant at the American magazine — and a fellow client of Kenneth and Margaret Millar's New York agent Harold Ober.

By mid-April, Ken Millar was properly launched on his Ride, and he told his wife: "I think I'm writing freer dialogue than I did in Tunnel … I think it's going to be OK."

Margaret had great news of her own to relate in April: she'd bought them a house in Santa Barbara, California — a town she said was nearly as beautiful as La Jolla. Enthusiastically she wrote Ken with details of their new home, its lovely city, and the acquaintances she'd already made, including a divorcee who was "not my soul-mate, but she does have a car, a fair am't of dough & a rather lively manner. (She also hunts wild pigs in the mountains at night with her boy friend, a detective here)."

Millar declared himself thrilled with this development: "I never dreamed I could have such nostalgia for a place I have never seen. But Santa Barbara is my spiritual home…" The town was his "Ithaca at the moment," he announced, "because my Penelope is there weaving her web of words." And he said: "Your friend (and her detective! did you say detective?) sounds interesting."

Margaret had even more amazing California news in June: Warner Bros, had bought film rights to The Iron Gates for $15,000 and was hiring her to write its script for $750 a week! Millar shared in the euphoria when he got word of his wife's spectacular good fortune on June 22: "My shipmates tell me I've been looking very well indeed the last few hours." He was full of encouragement for Margaret, and couldn't help observing "Hemingway got only 12 grand" from Warners for his book To Have and Have Not .

Around the same time as this remarkable development, Millar's ship took part in its only combat of World War Two. "Okinawa became ours yesterday," Ensign Millar wrote Margaret on June 22. Soon the Shipley Bay was headed Stateside.

No city had ever looked better to Ken Millar than the San Francisco he saw come into view in late July. If his earlier arrival in southern California had been psychologically meaningful, how much more must it have meant for him now to catch sight of this northern California port, his virtual birthplace.

Ensign Millar was reunited with his wife in San Francisco, after five months' separation. The couple enjoyed a week's leave together (Margaret had arranged for Linda's former nursery-school teacher from Michigan to look after the Millars' six-year-old in Santa Barbara) before parting on the very eve of Maggie's taking the train to southern California and the Warners lot.

When Margaret arrived at Warner Bros., it was love at first sight. The writers' building was full of famous authors. Maggie had an office down the hall from William Faulkner. Frequent New Yorker contributor John Collier drove her home (to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel) after her first day. Others on hire at the studio this season included W.R. Burnett (Little Caesar, High Sierra), the young Englishman Christopher Isherwood, Kurt Siodmak (Donovan's Brain) and Elliot Paul (The Last Time I Saw Paris, Hugger-Mugger in the Louvre). One of Margaret's first duties was to view Warners' 1941 version of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart as private detective Sam Spade, to see how closely movie followed book ("Pretty good picture," Maggie reported, "Bogart's damn good"). A few days later, she saw the studio's as-yet unreleased version of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, this time with Bogart as private eye Philip Marlowe. These were heady days.

When the Shipley Bay put in to San Diego for several weeks' repairs, Ken Millar saw Warners for himself, on August 14, 1945. It proved a memorable visit. That afternoon, Japan's surrender became official: World War Two was over. The Millars celebrated by having dinner and many drinks with Elliot Paul and his wife, after which Maggie and Paul had a two-hour marathon playing session at the two pianos in the Pauls' Hollywood living room.

Ken Millar's L.A. leave was memorable also for an encounter with William Faulkner, who spoke with the Millars about a range of things: from Herman Melville to his daughter's mare about to foal down in Oxford, Mississippi. "We… found," Millar wrote later, "that the fieriest imagination of our time resides in the gentlest of men." Only weeks earlier, Millar had been reading much Faulkner aboard ship and writing Maggie in wonder about "the unholy grandeur" of "maybe the best novelist" America had. A year from now, Ken, speaking for himself and Margaret, would claim Faulkner as "the favorite author of both of us." Millar the literary scholar read Faulkner (one of three writers given credit for the script of The Big Sleep ) as, among other things, a mystery novelist; he called Faulkner's book Sanctuary "about the best detective story I've read." He asked Margaret about a Sanctuary plot subtlety: "Did you get the impression that Temple's father framed (Popeye) for the murder he was hanged for? That isn't explained." (This Faulknerian ambiguity might be the inspiration for a recurring element in later Macdonald books: a final fact uncovered but uncommented on by the detective, though left in plain view for readers to perceive.) After shaking hands with Faulkner, Ken Millar joked he'd never wash his hand again.