Ross MacDonald: Strangers in Town: Three Newly Discovered Mysteries

The almost cruise-ship calm of the Shipley Bay in the waning weeks of now-Lt. j.g. Kenneth Millar's postwar Naval service was broken the evening of January 18, 1946, by the Shipley Bay's participation in a rescue at sea of the thirteen-man crew of a downed flying boat. "It was a perfect night for a rescue," Millar reported to Margaret. "Bright full moon. Fairly calm sea." Mission safely accomplished, Millar sat down and for about ninety minutes made notes of some of his plot notions. "It appears that I have ideas for 20 books!" he informed his wife. "Maybe 10 of them are worth writing. Maybe 5 of them will be written (because by that time I'll have ideas for others…) Anyway, my postwar plan includes plenty of work…"

Again he wished he knew which of his stories Ellery Queen had bought: "It would give me something to go on with, since I'd like to write them another story or two (I have a couple ideas — plenty, in fact, since any ’tec. novel can be written a short story.)" In the next days he plotted two mystery shorts but refrained from writing them in his cramped shipboard quarters, in the tropical heat: "I don't want to force to much production under difficult conditions, for fear that will destroy my enthusiasm for writing, my élan, my passion in a word. I don't want to become (or continue as) a hack…

By February, Millar had at last learned which Joe Rogers story Ellery Queen had bought: as he'd suspected, it was "Death by Air," though the magazine gave it a new name. On February 12, Millar informed Anthony Boucher by letter of "a hard-boiled short (re-titled Find the Woman ) which got me fourth prize and three C's (as they say in hard-boiled stories). I can say with certainty that I'd never have written it if you hadn't urged me to, so this is on the lines of a 'but for whom.' "

He also wouldn't have written it if Ellery Queen hadn't founded a magazine and given a contest. But whatever professional gratitude Ken Millar felt towards Ellery Queen, he didn't let it cloud the critical eye with which he read their fiction — a critical eye he needed to keep in sharp focus if he hoped to reach the artistic summit of his newly-chosen field. "Brought up [Queen's 1942 book] Calamity Town to read on watch," Millar wrote his wife in mid-February, "but boggled a bit after 2 pages… What a difference style makes. If a book hasn't got it I can read it only with difficulty, and EQ ain't g it, though how they try…"

… only one of the fifteen prizewinners in EQMM's first contest is classifiable as a hardboiled detective story. Even that one — Kenneth Millar's "Find the Woman" — is not a pure hardboileder. True, it presents in Rogers, the private dick, a Hammett-Chandler tough hombre; it offers a hard, realistic crime situation… And yet with all this, Kenneth Millar's story is not pure hardboiledism: its characters are not psychologically black-and-white, and there are undertones and over-tones in "Find the Woman" not usually woven into the fabric of tough ’tecs…Kenneth Millar's first book was The Dark Tunnel (Dodd, Mead), an excellent novel of suspense and pursuit in which the author "tried to treat a romantic and melodramatic plot in a realistic manner, with a hero who is not particularly heroic…" Those are Mr. Millar's own words and we wonder if they don't describe his short story, "Find the Woman," much more accurately and pointedly than your Editor has…

— Ellery Queen, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, June 1946

Discharged from active duty in the spring of 1946, Ken Millar joined his wife and child in Santa Barbara, where he felt the urgent need to get a few books under his professional belt. His mostly-shipboard-written thriller The Suicides was bought by Dodd, Mead, to be published as Trouble Follows Me. (To the author's dismay, Dodd, Mead rejected The Suicides title as "not box-office.") Millar quickly wrote two more crime novels, Blue City and The Three Roads, which his agent sold to the much more prestigious publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf.

Millar also did some half a dozen mainstream short stories after the war — only one of which, after six months' submissions, was bought for publication. The pragmatic Millar learned a lesson: in future, he wouldn't spend time on short stories unless a viable market presented itself.

One did in 1948. Ivan von Auw at the Harold Ober Agency suggested Millar try writing a story for the American, a slick magazine with a predominantly female readership. Millar had met one of the American's former editorial workers in the Navy: the public relations man who'd cleared the plot of Trouble Follows Me. He'd told Millar what that glossy's "very successful editorial policy" was: "promising the readers sex (e.g. through illustrations) but not giving it to them. It always works — see also the movies…"

Yet the American regularly printed good mystery stories, and von Auw thought he could sell them something by Ken. Millar gave it a try. The result was "The Bearded Lady," a novelette narrated by Sam Drake, the lead character from Trouble Follows Me . When it was bought, Millar was as discouraged as he was grateful. If he could so easily meet the American's calculating standards, maybe he was in real danger of becoming a hack.

Between The Three Roads and "The Bearded Lady," Millar wrote a novel-length work of mainstream fiction, Winter Solstice, which he judged unsuccessful and shelved without showing to a publisher. His next attempted book was The Snatch, a private-eye novel whose protagonist, Lew Archer, was essentially the same character as Joe Rogers, the southern California detective in the pair of Shipley Bay short stories written three years earlier.

Alfred Knopf balked at accepting The Snatch, claiming it inferior to the two Kenneth Millar novels his firm had printed. But when Millar instructed his agent to submit the manuscript elsewhere under the pseudonym "John Macdonald," Knopf reversed himself and published this "Macdonald" book in 1949 as The Moving Target .

A complaint by another writer, John D. MacDonald, caused Millar to change his new pseudonym to "John Ross Macdonald" for his next six books, including the second Lew Archer novel: 1950's The Drowning Pool . (Not until 1956 would he be known simply as "Ross Macdonald.")

Macdonald's first books earned strongly positive reviews from mystery-fiction critics (notably Anthony Boucher). Lew Archer was well-launched as a series character by 1950, year of the sixth annual Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine short-story contest. Millar/Macdonald wrote a long entry for this competition, "Strangers in Town" — the first Lew Archer short story per se . But (as with "Death by Water"), he soon saw the story's possibilities as a novel; he had it withdrawn from submission. "Strangers in Town" would provide the skeleton for the fourth Lew Archer novel, The Ivory Grin (written in 1951, published in 1952). (Millar also used elements of "Strangers in Town" in his 1953 story "The Imaginary Blonde," collected as "Gone Girl.")

Ken Millar next wrote short crime fiction for Manhunt, a digest-sized magazine that debuted in January 1953. No women's-magazine sensibility to worry about here; Manhunt aspired to revive the hard-boiled tradition of classic pulps such as Black Mask, while riding the coattails of Mickey Spillane's phenomenal popularity. Spillane was in the first issue of Manhunt — as was Kenneth Millar, with "Shock Treatment": that third story written (in four hours) aboard ship for the 1945 EQMM contest.

Macdonald published four new Lew Archer novelettes in Manhunt in the next twelve months. The rates were good, and the editors were eager.