Ross MacDonald - Strangers in Town - Three Newly Discovered Mysteries

And in 1953 he also wrote an Archer story for that year's Ellery Queen contest. Margaret Millar entered the EQMM event too — her first "official" try at the competition, since her 1945 entry was never publicly acknowledged. John Ross Macdonald's "Wild Goose Chase" won a third prize in this ninth annual EQMM event — while Margaret Millar's "The Couple Next Door" won a second prize.

In 1954, all Macdonald's published private-eye stories were gathered between soft covers by his paperback house, Bantam Books. "I thought up that thing and got it going," editor Saul David recalled. "I was always looking for ways with pet writers — and he was one of the people I really liked a lot — to get them extra money. One of the ways was to do anthologies, ’cause they had all written short stories — novellas and things. The audience never really loved that kind of thing — they wanted novels by and large — but if the writer was popular enough, you could in effect get away with it."

Joe Rogers and Sam Drake both became Lew Archer for this collection, which could then legitimately be titled The Name Is Archer. Millar rewrote all seven stories at least slightly. He took the romantic bits out of "The Bearded Lady" and put in a fist fight. In the Manhunt novelettes, he removed some of the more violent details.

The Name Is Archer was a surprise hit — a surprise to Millar, anyway — and maybe that caused its author to take ballpoint in hand and do another Archer novelette, "The Angry Man." This time apparently the story's potential as a novel was so obvious Millar didn't bother to have his handwritten pages typed. "The Angry Man" stayed in one of his spiral-bound plot notebooks for future reference. In time it became the basis of the 1958 Archer novel The Doomsters .

Once that novel was written (but before it was published), the story underwent still more permutations. Having sold two previous books to Cosmopolitan magazine for condensation, Millar did an abridged version of The Doomsters on spec for Cosmo. When it was rejected (partly because the magazine's editors found the idea of a female killer distasteful), Millar rewrote his abridgment, changing the villain to a male. This draft was also turned down by Cosmo; it sold, though, to EQMM, where eventually it was printed in 1962 as "Bring the Killer to Justice."

A new crime-fiction journal launched in 1960 prompted the writing of the penultimate Lew Archer short story.

The digest was Ed McBain's Mystery Magazine. Millar was in the middle of writing the ninth Lew Archer novel, The Wycherly Woman, when this publication asked for an Archer novelette.

"I was sorta conned into it, in a way," Millar remembered later to journalist Paul Nelson. "An editor wanted me to do it, and I said I wouldn't but that I would give it thought or something. He came back saying, my name was on the cover and I had to write it. You know, it's an old trick… That's what got the story written: I thought I had to."

The writer took five days off from his novel to pen a story, "Midnight Blue," then went right back to work on the book. "It's the sort of thing you shouldn't do," he told Nelson. "That isn't the way to produce good ones." But he conceded of "Midnight Blue": "Actually, it's not the worst of the stories."

The final Archer short story written and published, "The Sleeping Dog," was commissioned by a more unlikely periodical: Sports Illustrated .

In February 1964, a senior editor from that magazine contacted Millar and proposed Ross Macdonald do a 4,000- to 6,000-word Lew Archer story with a sports background of some sort. The editor, who was a great fan of Macdonald's work, said the sports hook could be slight. Millar was eager to try, though (again) he was in the middle of polishing a new book ( The Serpent's Tooth, published as The Far Side of the Dollar ), and very involved, as he told Ivan von Auw, as a Santa Barbara conservationist, "fighting a vocal public battle on behalf of the Calif. Condors, of which some sixty remain, and which are menaced by Forest Service policies."

He told the Sports Illustrated man about his fight to save the condors, too; and the editor had another idea: why didn't Macdonald write a quick nonfiction piece about that for SI as well?

Millar did, and the article ran in April. Once paid for the article, Millar started work on the short story. "Having to include sports is rather a nuisance," he admitted to von Auw's partner Dorothy Olding, "but I think I'll lick it okay."

He met the requirement by hatching a plot that involved hunting and dog training. "The Sleeping Dog" was 6,000 words long and typically complex; Millar had to labor to keep the story down to SI's limit. "It certainly contains the germ of a book," he thought. He mailed the story in August.

Alas, Sports Illustrated decided the short story's sporting peg was too thin after all, though they encouraged the author to try another one on them. Millar thought not. He made clear to Olding it hadn't been his fault: "[The editor's] original request to me, you should know, was quite vague, giving as one illustration of a 'sports background' 'sipping rum in the sun.' But I expected to have to waste a story to get from him the truth, which editors can constitutionally yield up only in the form of a negative reaction." He requested she sell the story elsewhere if she could.

"The Sleeping Dog" was submitted to and turned down by The Saturday Evening Post, This Week, and Cosmopolitan before Argosy bid $500. Millar said fine, and it was published there in April of ’65.

Millar still thought the story had book or TV potential, but the experience of writing it "to order" and then having it rejected left a bad taste that lingered. When young publisher Otto Penzler contracted to collect all the Archer short stories in hardcover for the first time in 1976, Millar didn't want "The Sleeping Dog" included. (Penzler insisted it should be, and it was.)

From first to last, Millar/Macdonald's short stories gave glimpses of (and opportunities for) Lew Archer's development as a character, and Ross Macdonald's growth as an artist — from the young but already skilled professional of 1945’s "Death by Air" and "Death by Water" to the older and wiser man of such 1960s masterworks as The Chill .

This mutual progress always held the keenest professional and personal interest for Kenneth Millar. As he told Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times in 1975, while working on what would prove to be the final Lew Archer novel: "Archer began as a child of the genre and gradually became an individual. I hope that that happened to his writer as well."

" 'The Pacific bears some resemblance' ": Kenneth Millar to Professor Louis I. Bredvold, March 10, 1945, Louis I. Bredvold Correspondence, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

" 'a work of almost insane penetration' ": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, February 25, 1945, K. Millar Papers, UCI.

" 'still a masterpiece' ": Ibid.

" 'no masterpiece' ": Ibid.

" 'often amusing' ": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, March 10, 1945, K Millar Papers, UCI.

" 'far and away' ": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, April 21, 1945, UCI. Millar had not read Oliver Onions before, but: "I remember my mother used to talk about him…"

"'had a riproarious time'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, June 4, 1945, UCI; KM to MM, June 5, 1945, UCI.

"'a stinker'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, March 5, 1945, UCI.

"'the first really good movie'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, March 24, 1945, UCI.

"'so bad'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, March 12, 1945, UCI.