Ross MacDonald: Strangers in Town: Three Newly Discovered Mysteries

On October 17, Millar told Margaret he was "nearly finished my story (wrote 14 pages last night, was up practically all night) of which I am not proud but I'm proud of myself for getting down to writing again. I'll write more stories and eventually get pretty good — I hope — then I'll go on with my book. It's wonderful what a little practice will do for one's expression. Also, when I really get into it, I love writing."

Doing this Rogers opus was prompting notions for other possible contest entries, Millar said — for instance, "a story which I'm almost afraid to write it's going to be so terrible: about the crime, flight, and hunting down of a sex maniac — entitled The Tribulations of Mr. Small. I'll write it, by gum, even if I am afraid to, as soon as we get out of Pearl… This contest, you see is for both crime and detective stories. Altogether, I have ideas for about six stories, one or two of which would make books. But the important thing, isn't it, is to get some writing done, get into the groove, feel like a writer (so difficult for me still," Millar reminded his prolific book-writing wife, "since I lack your wonderful assurance.)"

Soon he could say of his Rogers tale: "Finished my story, between 9-10,000 words. Wish it were better…"

It was good enough. Though a bit awkward, this first-person story had energy and style. It was clearly inspired by Chandler, and its downbeat ending recalled Dashiell Hammett; but its delight in language, its droll one-liners, its ironic tone, and its fast pace seemed fresh and all Millar's own. The story flashed intriguing glimpses of Hollywood types at work and at play (drawn with the authority of Millar's visits to his wife's new world) and candid snaps of a southern California already in transition from wartime to postwar. With its foreshadowings and elaborate similes, the story was something out of the ordinary, and also a highly professional piece of prose: in some ways not as good as Chandler, but in others maybe half a step ahead. Its few pages covered a lot of ground: Santa Barbara beach cottage, Wilshire Boulevard apartment, San Fernando Valley ranch house, Hollywood movie lot, Sunset Strip-night club, coroner's office. In its geographical range, it prefigured the long, book-length odysseys of Lew Archer, the first of which was three years in the future. Also presaging things to come in the Archer books were this tale's intergenerational betrayals and jealousies, and its diseased moral climate, in which evil is contagious and guilt shared. Ken Millar sowed the seeds for a thirty-year career as a detective novelist in one quickly-written short story.

Millar left these pages onboard ship when he met again with Margaret for a few days in late October in San Francisco, at the Fairmont. The couple's parting came all too soon; in the rush, Millar left his navy-blue raincoat at the hotel. Back on ship, a lonely Millar wrote his wife: "I drowned my sorrows in reading."

This year saw republication of many works by an American author Ken Millar first read as a teenager in Ontario, Canada: F. Scott Fitzgerald. This was the writer in whose books Millar now submerged himself, in weeks during which he wrote and rewrote pages that would make a prototype for his eventual life's-work. Later Millar would say he'd learned more about style and technique from Fitzgerald than from any other writer. Some fruits of those lessons may even be seen in his very earliest private-eye stories.

Tender Is the Night was the first Fitzgerald book Ken Millar read on the Shipley Bay. He consumed it in one evening, finding it "marvellous. In writing and conception of human relations and depth of tragic perception, it's easily his best book… Nicole, with her 'white crooks' eyes,' is an amazing creation…" For contrast, Millar next read most of James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan: "pretty powerful, with a terrific ending — but oh so depressing" — so much so, he put it aside and went back to his own fiction.

Millar began penning a second case for private eye Rogers, who now acquired the first name Joe. "Death by Water" began at a southern California bungalow hotel, the Valeria Pueblo, which closely resembled places the Millars had recently stayed, including the Casa Mañana in La Jolla and the Chapman Park in L.A.

"I wrote 14 pages on my second detective story and rewrote the first," Millar reported to Margaret on November 2. "Neither, I'm afraid, is good enough for Ellery Queen — I just don't seem to be able to put out in a short detective story." But the tales were serving a useful purpose: "getting me back in the writing groove — the words are coming easier again… I'll probably write a third story just for the hell of it…"

He told his wife, "Like you, I have a hard time thinking in the short story form: I either get really interested in my characters or can't get interested at all… My writing time is too short these days to lavish loving care on a couple of harassed mystery shorts…" But he asked Margaret: "Can you check for me whether a murderer can inherit money from his victim in California?"

On November 4, he announced, "I just mailed to you registered first class the first two cases of Joe Rogers whoever he may be, Death by Air (nearly 10,000) and Death by Water (over 7,000)." Neither, he repeated, was good enough; and only one could be published, he felt, since the murder-methods were too similar. Yet: "it feels good to have written them and I really enjoyed writing for the first time in ages… If either or both of the stories looks at all hopeful to you, please edit them or it as drastically as possible, have 'em typed and send 'em off through [Ober agent] Ivan [von Auw] to arrive by December 3… I know they need rewriting (I wrote the final 15 pages of Water straight away in one sitting today) but I haven't the time or inclination…"

He did find time for more of his new favorite writer. "The more I read of Fitzgerald, the crazier I am about him," Millar told Margaret, "especially his style — high, chaste, romantic and colloquial at once, the very essence of the ideal style and thus of course lacking a little weight and warmth — and his ability to put a bloom, a priceless loving quality, on people and their relations. His main defect is an idealizing tendency, which makes his characters a little too good to be true even when they're bad… Still, what a writer, and how much he has to teach about writing (he understood style and technique both generally and in detail better than any other U.S. writer…). It practically makes me weep to read those waltzing paragraphs: what an eye and ear and touch." Millar's re-immersion in Fitzgerald, at the age of nearly-thirty, and his first-ever reading of Tender Is the Night, seemed to have as profound an effect on him as had reading Dickens at ten, Hammett at fifteen, and Chandler at twenty-five. After writing the above to Margaret, Millar sat down the same night and re-read The Great Gatsby straight through: something he'd later do almost yearly. Then he read all the Fitzgerald short stories he could find, and asked Margaret to send him The Crack-Up .

Beside such grace, his own efforts seemed puny. Millar was self-deprecating about his recent private-eye tales: "I seriously doubt that I'll ever set the Sacramento River on fire with my mystery shorts, don't you?" But at the same time, he said, "I feel quite smugly happy about getting back to writing and liking it." And he was fond of the characters he'd created, "Air" 's Millicent Dreen and "Water" 's the Ralstons, "though both are limned with unnecessary crudity…" In fact, he thought, " Water could make a nice crappy little mystery novel, maybe, huh?"

Millar asked that Maggie add a tag line to "Water" if she found out about the inheritance aspect: "Either: It worked, John'll get it. Or: The irony of it the effort was wasted, John won't get the money anyway on account of — (I think the latter is correct but wouldn't know.)" After consulting a toxicology text, Millar sent his wife some rewritten lines to insert into a coroner's explanation of a drowning in "Death by Air."