Ross Macdonald by Tom Nolan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[...] recurring patterns in Macdonald's plots which [...] more resembled Dickens' and Faulkner's than Hammetts's or Chandler's. [...] All men are guilty and all human actions are connected. The past is never past. The child is father to the man. True reality resides in dreams. And most of all, everyone gets what he deserves, but no one deserves what he gets."
(George Grella, University of Rochester, on main motifs in works of Ross Macdonald)

Tom Nolan's Ross Macdonald: A Biography (1999) is an outstanding book. The biography portrays the life and works of one of my most favorite writers, the author of "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American." As much as I dislike critical hype and hyperbole, I completely agree with these words of a literary critic about Macdonald's series of novels featuring Lew Archer, a California P.I. I have reviewed all 18 Archer novels, written between the late 1940s and the mid-1970s, here on Goodreads. Two of these novels, The Underground Man and The Chill , are in my view near-masterpieces, and deserve inclusion in the so-called serious literature category.

Sue Grafton, an accomplished and popular mystery author, provides a touching introduction to the biography and emphasizes the profound influence Macdonald had on her own writing. Mr. Nolan provides a detailed account of Ross Macdonald's early years. While most of us know that Macdonald is a pseudonym of Kenneth Millar, fewer readers are aware of the author's fractured childhood and checkered youth, when he spent most of his days apart from his parents and was raised mainly by aunts and uncles, continually changing addresses, cities, and even countries - he spent many years of his youth in Canada. After serving in the US Navy as a communication officer, he studied literature at the University of Michigan and obtained the PhD degree based on the thesis about Samuel Coleridge. His first books, non-Archer ones, were firmly grounded in the hard-boiled crime genre. The Archer series illustrates the author's evolution that freed his writing from the constraints of hard-boiled genre and led to the depth of late works that masterfully depict the human condition.

The biography is fantastically rich in details, analyses and interpretations, so for sake of brevity I will just mention the few threads that I find the most important. The dramatic youth, possible mental illness, and tragic early death of Macdonald's daughter, Linda, cast a long shadow upon the author's life and writing. A Newsweek journalist offers perhaps an oversimplified yet astute diagnosis when he writes about Linda and Macdonald's novels: "she's really the one that all those novels are about."

Another major thread in Macdonald's life is his marriage to Margaret Sturm, later Margaret Millar, an accomplished and popular mystery writer who in 1956 won the prestigious Edgar Award for her Beast in View . The couple had married in 1938 and stayed together until Macdonald's death 45 years later. The thread of spousal "competition" is totally fascinating: in the beginning years it was Margaret who was supporting the family financially through her mystery writing when her husband focused on his academic and military careers; but towards the end, it was Mr. Millar whose earnings dwarfed those of his wife's, when he became a worldwide acclaimed author.

The third thread in the biography is focused on sort of a "rivalry" between Macdonald and Raymond Chandler. It may be true that in the early stages of his literary career Kenneth Millar used Chandler's hard-boiled style as inspiration and pattern to imitate. However, he certainly grew beyond the hard-boiled canon. Mr. Chandler used to denigrate Macdonald's literary skills and disagreed with grouping Macdonald along himself and Dashiell Hammett as the three masters of the genre. In fact, some of Chandler's statements might be construed as attempts to sabotage Macdonald's career. I apologize to Chandler's fans but I think his novels are generally inferior to these of Macdonald's and that listing Chandler as Mr. Millar's equal is not justified. To me, only one novel by Chandler, The Long Goodbye is comparable in class to the best of Macdonald's works.

Fascinating biography and I need to toss a coin to decide whether to round my 4.5 rating up or down.

Four and a half stars.


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