Strangers in Town: Three Newly Discovered Mysteries

Introduction

Literary critics like Edmund Wilson might feel the need in 1945 to justify an interest in detective fiction, but Ensign Kenneth Millar — an English-criticism doctoral candidate who'd left the University of Michigan to serve as a U.S. Naval officer in World War Two — had no such cultural qualms.

Millar had been enjoying crime tales since childhood — along with shelvesful of classic and contemporary literature, nonfiction, poetry, psychology and philosophy. A brilliant intellect and an aesthetic democrat, Ken Millar savored (and saw the links that connected) the best of all creative efforts, from Kierkegaard to the Keystone Kops.

While still at Michigan, Millar (an A plus graduate student) put aside his doctoral dissertation on the psychological criticism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write in a month (and sell to Dodd, Mead) the domestic spy thriller The Dark Tunnel, a tale the Saturday Review's mystery critic judged one of the "books that poked their heads above the fog of a murky"{" 'books that poked their heads above the fog' ": Judge Lynch, "… let him die!" Saturday Review, January 6, 1945.} 1944 and "the best 'suspense' yarn of the year."

Ensign Millar (whose Tunnel came out as he began Naval duty) didn't plan to return to the university after the war. He intended to make his living as a freelance writer, a scheme much encouraged by his wife Margaret Millar, who by 1945 had herself (with her husband's extensive assistance) produced six well-received mystery novels.

In the three decades after The Dark Tunnel, Kenneth Millar (via a three-stage pseudonym) would become known internationally as Ross Macdonald, author of eighteen books featuring private investigator Lew Archer: works a New York Times reviewer would call "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American."

Macdonald would also publish in those years nine Lew Archer short stories, mainly "novelettes" 10- to 15,000 words long, all tailored for specific periodicals. "Most of them were written in a hurry to keep the wolf from the door,"{" 'Most of them were written in a hurry' ": Millar to John D. Sutcliffe, February 14, 1975; typed copy, the Kenneth Millar Papers, Special Collections and Archives UC Davis Libraries.} the author later said of these Archer shorts, "and not one of them belongs with my mature work."

Nonetheless, genre critics rank Macdonald's short stories among the best modern hard-boiled tales. While the author was right in thinking they weren't on the same level of art as his novels, these shorts have a vivid immediacy that continues to speak strongly to readers. More than mere vehicles to earn quick cash, the short stories gave compelling alternate glimpses of Lew Archer at work in postwar California: that "endless city" stretching from the Mexican border nearly to Oregon.

And it was in the short-story form that Millar first found the private-eye voice through which he would tell nearly all of his novels.

This volume prints for the first time three previously unpublished Millar/Macdonald private-eye stories: Kenneth Millar's 1945 tale "Death by Water" (the second and final case of one Joe Rogers, private investigator), John Ross Macdonald's 1950 Lew Archer novelette "Strangers in Town," and Ross Macdonald's 1955 Archer story "The Angry Man."

All are arguably as good as Macdonald's published novelettes. Millar's reasons for not wanting these stories printed were professional, not aesthetic.

"Death by Water" employed a murder-method Millar felt too similar to that of another story he'd written. "Strangers in Town" was withdrawn when the author wanted to use its plot elements for a Lew Archer novel. "The Angry Man" was also held back to provide scaffolding for a book.

Today these stories read as crisply as when they were crafted, and they suggest their eras with an authenticity no newly-written pieces could.

The place Macdonald's stories evoke so effectively is California, a region inextricably linked to Ross Macdonald's fiction and to Kenneth Millar's identity.

Though brought up in Canada, Millar was born (in 1915) in Los Gatos, California, near San Francisco. Throughout his childhood, he was reminded he was by birth a U.S. citizen; and the mother who raised him (virtually on her own) spoke often of California as a golden land where Kenneth by rights belonged, and where she hoped he'd return.

It was no whim that had Ensign Millar request, after completing communications training at Boston and Princeton in 1944, to be assigned in early '45 to the 11th Naval District headquarters in San Diego, the city his parents had lived in a year before his birth. In traveling "back" to California, Millar prepared himself psychologically to come into his own, as an American citizen and as an artist.

"I felt as if a very long, long circle had been completed,"{" 'I felt as if a very long, long circle had been completed' ": Millar interview with Arthur Kaye, UCI.} Millar later said of his wartime journey to the West Coast."… I got a tremendous thrill coming in on the Santa Fe train over the great ridge that divides California from Arizona, and coming down across the green summery land that stretches out towards the Pacific. I can't say I felt as if I was coming home, but I felt as if I had perhaps arrived in a place where I wanted to live."

Accompanying the 29-year-old Millar on the Santa Fe Grand Canyon Limited were his wife Margaret and their five-year-old daughter Linda. Both grownup Millars felt an instant sense of déjà-vu in southern California, a place they "knew" from dozens of Hollywood movies. The three Millars stayed for a month (courtesy of the U.S. Navy) at the Cabrillo Hotel in La Jolla, a beautiful oceanfront town they fell in love with. La Jolla immediately became a key point of Ken Millar's imagination; it would be the fictional setting for several Macdonald books. The strongwilled Margaret Millar declared right away she would make Southern California their home; soon she'd start trekking the coast in search of a house to rent or buy.

Margaret and Kenneth Millar would both come into their own as writers in California, though Kenneth's greatest success would take years, while Margaret's was just around the corner. Their mutual immersion in California culture began in La Jolla, where they were befriended by Max Miller, author of the bestselling book I Cover the Waterfront. (Within a year, Max Miller would be near-neighbors in La Jolla with Raymond Chandler, a California novelist both Millars greatly admired.)

In February 1945, Ensign Millar was assigned to duty aboard the U.S.S. Shipley Bay, an aircraft carrier in the south Pacific. But his exposure to cultural influence (Californian and otherwise) continued: through first-run Hollywood movies shown aboard ship, through live and recorded music, and through the books and magazines Millar read voraciously. In his isolated weeks at sea, Ken Millar was awash in all sorts of culture, from popular to mainstream to "mandarin." It all helped shape his own creative vision at this crucial juncture.

Millar admired the best art, high and low. The range of his appreciation can be seen in lines he wrote one of his Michigan professors from the Shipley Bay: "The Pacific bears some resemblance just now to Dante's non-spatial heaven, and I to a disembodied spirit speaking from the void. I like the place I'm haunting, though; the chow is good, the work is interesting and my fellow-spirits very helpful, I have a book by Andre Gide out of the ship's library, and the nightly movie tonight is 'My Favorite Blonde,' with Bob Hope…"

The Shipley Bay had a good lending library (Millar was thrilled to find his wife's Fire Will Freeze on hand); and Margaret mailed additional volumes to Ken. Among works Millar read in February and March of 1945 were Virginia Woolf's To the Light House ("a work of almost insane penetration into human relations," Ken commented to Margaret, in one of the near-daily letters they exchanged for almost a year, "and especially the nature of love and of vanity, which is love's little brother"), Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn ("still a masterpiece"), Irving Stone's Lust for Life ("no masterpiece"), John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat "often amusing but a leetle arty"), Oliver Onions' The Beckoning Fair One ("far and away the best horror story I have ever read"), Checkhov's The Hollow, Edmund Pearson's Studies in Murder, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Thurber and White's Is Sex Necessary? the sonnets of Shakespeare, and "The Song of Solomon."

Sitting out on deck in the tropics, Millar got sunburned reading John O'Hara's Butterfield 8. Drinking four beers and four whiskey sours in a ramshackle officers' club on some Pacific outpost, he "had a riproarious time" reading Agatha Christie's The Hazelmoor Mystery: "A singularly dull book, I thought; even alcohol couldn't stimulate more than a faint interest in it… Yeah, I figured out the Agatha in the first chapter, but then she wrote it way back in 1931. I remember seeing it when it came out in a magazine that year; I also remember how much better it seemed then…"

Among the nightly movies Millar saw aboard ship in the spring of 1945 were The Woman in the Window, Together Again with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne ("a stinker"), The Guest in the House ("the first really good movie I've seen on board… really psychologico-shivery"), Belle of the Yukon with Gypsy Rose Lee ("so bad it was practically good") — and Double Indemnity, from the book by Millar favorite James M. Cain, with a script by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler ("really first class").

Bombarded by such stimuli, it wasn't long before Millar's own creative urge was aroused. On March 12 he wrote his wife he was "playing around with ideas for stories. I mean short stories, which interest me more right now than anything else." By March 17 he'd written "The Homecoming," a mainstream short about a serviceman returning to his wife. It was set in San Diego, since, as Millar told Margaret, these days "the only place I imagine with automatic ease is Southern California."

Without pause he began plotting two novels, one a wartime spy-story and the other a "psychological love-story" about a Navy survivor and a nurse. He took the spy-story for an OK to his commanding officer, who told him to run the plot past a Navy public relations man.

Partly Millar was moved to action by a letter from his Dodd, Mead editor, hoping Millar would be able to work up a book or two even while at sea. Also encouraging must have been an unexpected query forwarded from a Beverly Hills agent wanting to represent The Dark Tunnel for movie sale, and Millar for movie-writing. "No doubt it doesn't mean much," Ken shrugged to Margaret of the agent's letter, "but I liked getting it, and… if I wasn't otherwise occupied I'd certainly have a try at it."

Soon Millar reported that "the successor to Tunnel… is taking shape (in my head)." On March 24 he wrote Margaret excitedly, "I couldn't go to sleep last night for dreaming up my new thriller plot… I think it has the old nightmare quality — it should have, I got it in a nightmare practically…" By March 28 he'd written ten pages of The Long Ride, a novel whose story he admitted was "somewhat outlandish but it should do. The main thing is the action, which shifts from Oahu to Detroit to San Diego and Tia Juana… The long ride occurs on the Grand Canyon Limited, naturally, and also stands for death, also for the ride this guy was taken for, see? Maybe it has sexual implications, too."

Also sparking Millar's creativity this week was a finished copy of his wife's latest book, The Iron Gates, which he received aboard ship in late March; he immediately sat down and re-read "treasured bits" of it. Margaret had gotten a $500 advance for this manuscript, whose working title had been "The Skull Beneath the Skin." Her publisher Random House thought highly of the work; they packaged it handsomely and planned to promote it aggressively, not as a mystery but as "a novel of suspense." Their campaign would lead to important reviews, good sales, and favorable reprint deals. A movie deal seemed likely. Her husband urged Margaret to make her next book even better than Gates: "In the light of what you've done in less than five years, your possibilities seem practically limitless." Ken enumerated some qualities he thought Margaret Millar's writing and personality had in common: "Honesty so profound it makes you continually unhappy, and so much spirit you are literally younger now than when I met you… (I long since set myself the definite task of keeping up with you…)"

Besides his wife, the writer who most immediately inspired Ken Millar was Raymond Chandler, whose four detective books he'd read with intense pleasure. The second of these, Farewell, My Lovely (1940), had just been filmed as Murder, My Sweet, with Dick Powell starring as Chandler's private-eye hero Philip Marlowe. Ken Millar broke away from writing The Long Ride to watch Murder, My Sweet on the Shipley Bay screen the night of March 30. He loved what he saw. It wasn't as good as the Chandler-coscripted Double Indemnity, he thought, but he would enjoy it more than any other movie he'd see on ship.

"[I]f Chandler ever brings out another (book)—" Millar wrote Margaret, "which is doubtful since he can do the same stuff for Hollywood at 10 times the price — be sure to send it to me — he's the only one that carries me away — you don't count: you'd carry me away if you couldn't write your name."

After that Marlowe movie, the following weeks' cinema fare seemed mostly pathetic to Millar: Experiment Perilous ("a stinker"), Jungle Woman ("a bum B picture (or C)"), Orchestra Wives with Glenn Miller ("I lasted about 20 minutes"), Spotlight Scandals ("a prime stinker"), The Conspirators with Hedy Lamarr ("surely the world's most passive actress"), Betty Grable in Footlight Serenade ("ghastly"), and The Falcon in Hollywood ("at which I lasted… just five minutes, just long enough to spot the killer").

More consistently pleasurable (and often, it seemed, more conducive to creativity) was the time Ken Millar spent on ship listening to music: on records, over Armed Services radio, and occasionally in person. One of his shipmates, Millar reported to Margaret, "plays a fairly hot clarinet. Every now and then he contrives to form a small jazz ensemble in the wardroom, which makes music of a kind. I've been hearing some good music at work… over the radio: whole programs of Ellington, Waller, Lena Home, Cole Porter, Charlie Barnet…" (A yeoman onboard actually knew Porter, — who sent him advance copies of his songs.) One of the "Negro stewards" who served the Shipley Bay's officers in the mess had jazz records which Ensign Millar sometimes spent an hour "down the hall" listening to: a Fats Waller version of "Ain't Misbehavin' " that the Millars had in their own collection, " 'Don't Cry Baby,' " some Ellingtoniana, some very hot stuff by Jack Teagarden and a small group including a vocalist called Peggy Lee who is very veddy good." Listening to these discs made Millar feel "extremely nostalgic" for Margaret, he told her: "It's all mixed up with sex… I think writing is too… a high form of mental masturbation…"

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.

Warners visits aside, Millar spent most of his three-week leave at the Chapman Park Hotel (where Margaret had moved from the Roosevelt), "writing laboriously and unenthusiastically on my still-to-be-stillborn thriller," as he reported to their Michigan mystery-writer friend H.C. Branson, "while Margaret went to the office to earn unimaginable sums…" Millar was sincerely pleased with his wife's success, but he was keenly aware of the new disparity between their salaries. The earnings gap made him uneasy, as did the great professional distance his wife had put between them. Millar needed some way to catch up, however modestly.

One possibility presenting itself was to enter a short story contest being sponsored this year by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, a competition soliciting entries from the country's top detective and crime writers (including William Faulkner).

Launched in 1941 (the one-hundredth anniversary of the first mystery story, Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue") by Frederic Dannay, who with his cousin Manfred B. Lee had written popular detective fiction since 1929 as Ellery Queen, the digest-sized EQMM had done much to revive and sustain the mystery short story. Now Queen was doing even more, with a competition offering thousands of dollars in prize money. Both Millars talked of entering the well-publicized contest.

The challenge was on Ken Millar's mind the last days of his leave, as he and Margaret returned with their daughter and her nanny to Santa Barbara and Ken saw for the first time the home his wife had made for them at 2124 Bath. (He'd work the house and its address into a scene in The Long Ride.) When leave ended, he returned to San Diego for two weeks (accompanied by his family), then shipped out on September 26.

The Shipley Bay had been converted to a troop transport, to pick up servicemen from posts far and near and ferry them back to the States. On Millar's second night aboard, his fertile subconscious concocted a surreal mystery plot which he sardonically described to Margaret: "I dreamed a queer dream: a complete murder story, or so it seemed, with suspects, atmosphere, detection, and surprises. The corpse was a woman at first and towards the end a man, all without explanation. Also without explanation, it was the corpse who turned out to be the murderer. So it looks as if I won't be able to use the plot for the Ellery Queen contest, unless their standards become surprisingly elastic."

If his dream wouldn't do for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, it would certainly have intrigued Karen Horney, the psychoanalyst whose book Millar was reading and liking this week (and which may have fed his fertile subconscious). "Reading a book like that," Millar wrote his wife, "is seeing myself in practically every case-history… every neurotic type… You, of course, are the other person I'm always looking for…" He didn't think either of them were actual neurotics, Millar assured Margaret. "Still, I intend to be analyzed after the war… I'm interested and should learn from the experience, I hope not too much." In the meantime, Millar told Margaret, "I don't after all have a copy of [the EQMM] contest-rules and I'm still interested, so if you have 'em send 'em along or better bring them to Frisco…"

Margaret did that when she met Millar again in San Francisco on October 9 for four days. Neither of them had yet decided to enter the Ellery Queen contest; but the final night of Millar's stay, Kenneth and Margaret met someone who persuaded them they should: William A.P. White, a writer best known by his pen name of Anthony Boucher.

The 34-year-old Boucher, equally involved with mystery fiction and science fiction, wore many hats: novelist, short-story writer, translator (notably, later, of Jorge Luis Borges's first tale published in English), eventual magazine and book editor, radio scriptwriter (The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Adventures of Ellery Queen, though the latter was a well-kept secret), and — most importantly for the Millars — critic. Boucher covered crime fiction in the San Francisco Chronicle; in a few years, he'd become mystery reviewer for the New York Times. A charter member of the newly-formed Mystery Writers of America, Anthony Boucher was well on his way to being the most influential detective-fiction critic in the country; and he was a fan of both Margaret and Kenneth Millar's work.

Boucher, who lived in Berkeley, came to the Millars' hotel on a Thursday night to share several rounds of cocktails. The critic had given Margaret's The Iron Gates what Ken thought its best-written and smartest review, in the Chronicle; now he congratulated Kenneth Millar on The Dark Tunnel, a mention of which he'd work into his essay on spy fiction for Howard Haycraft's 1946 anthology The Art of the Mystery Story. It wasn't fair, Boucher joked, that so much writing talent should exist in one family. He strongly encouraged the Millars to submit entries in the Ellery Queen contest. (He also urged they join the Mystery Writers of America, which they would.)

"I liked Boucher Millar wrote Margaret a few days later from sea, "a good guy, and intelligent enough for keeps." (Margaret liked him too, but she said: "Sorry I got plastered Thurs. p.m. No wonder. Next time we see Boucher let's start Later.")

"Anthony Boucher's few words of praise and the inspiration of you had such a bracing effect on me that Friday night (the day we left…)," Millar told his wife, "I sat down and wrote 10 pages on a story, which I know isn't good enough for the EQMM but still it's writing… 'Low Tide Murder' the title — I worked it all out Friday night. It's good only sporadically, I know, but the good parts are what interest me."

In this short story (which he'd retitle "Death by Air"), he announced to Margaret, he was developing a detective who'd be a "successor" to Chandler's Philip Marlowe, and a style "which I'll go on with for a bit till I hit pay dirt."

The character, who would indeed lead Millar to pay dirt, came to life aboard the Shipley Bay; but he'd been conceived, in a manner of speaking, in a San Francisco hotel room — not far from where Millar himself had been born some thirty years before.

Millar's detective was a Santa Barbara private eye named Rogers, who spoke in a Chandleresque cadence: "My initial fee is one hundred dollars. After that I charge people according to how much I think I can get out of them." Some of the people Rogers met had the same last names as a few of Millar's shipmates; and Rogers' client seemed obliquely inspired by a recurring character from Anthony Boucher's fiction.

Millar had pointedly sought out Boucher's work as soon as he got back to the Shipley Bay; the captain loaned him one novel Boucher had had an anonymous hand in rewriting. If Millar read any of Boucher's four books about L.A. p.i. Fergus O'Breen, he'd have encountered that eye's sister Maureen O'Breen, "head of publicity at Metropolis Pictures." Millar's Rogers is hired in "Death by Air" by one Millicent Dreen, who does "national publicity for Tele-Pictures."

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."

Margaret pronounced herself thrilled with the Rogers stories: "Was utterly delighted at your dialogue & the freer flow of things. There's nothing amateur in them." She wrote a final paragraph for "Water" as instructed, made the inserts he'd requested, had the stories professionally typed and sent them to New York for submission.

Margaret too was working on a story for the contest; hearing it described, her husband said, "It sounds like the sort of thing that could cop a prize by originality and good writing…"

Stimulated by his Rogers efforts, Millar found he now had "plenty of good ideas for shorts — too many — but would hate to spend too much time unprofitably." Still he took time to write a third competition entry — not "The Tribulations of Mr. Small" but a grim murder story titled "Shock" (told completely in dialogue, and finished in four hours) which he mailed from the south Pacific directly to Ellery Queen.

With his EQMM "duties" out of the way, Millar returned to his novel. He was able to brag to Margaret in mid-November: "I am proud to report that I've added, in the last four days, 8000 words to Ride — not all of it good, by any means, but all of it wordage, and some of it good, in varying ways… Ain't it hard, though, to handle a bunch of people on a train trip?… I've fluffed it quite badly but I don't give a damn… [W]hat I want is to finish this book, my personal albatross, and never think of it again."

As he wrote, the Shipley Bay made its way to the atoll of Kwajalein and back. In addition to writing, as usual Millar read: Don Marquis' Archy and Mehitabel, Ann Arbor friend Henry Branson's latest mystery The Fearful Passage ("quietly perfect… damn good"); and Prater Violet, a brief novel about a film producer, by one of Maggie's Warners co-workers, Chris Isherwood. "As a piece of technical work," Millar said of the latter, "the book can teach me plenty: it has an easy grace and deceptive casualness that I find very enviable." But not as enviable as the traits of his latest literary hero: "A page of the letters Fitzgerald dashed off almost invariably has more meat than one of Isherwood's very carefully written pages," Millar maintained. "Compared with Fitzgerald, Isherwood doesn't seem very much alive." He went back to re-reading Margaret's gift copy to him of Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up.

Millar the writer continued to make good progress on The Long Ride. When he learned late in December he'd be discharged from the service next March 15, he wondered if that might not give him just "time enough… to run another book through the mill."

Meanwhile the current one needed last-minute research. Two days before Christmas, Millar finally managed to reach a Honolulu detective by telephone from the Navy Yard to verify Hawaiian police procedure and terminology for his book's early scenes. The Suicides (his new title for The Long Ride) was ready to be typed. A shipmate prepared the manuscript for Millar, so sick of typewriters after his Shipley Bay duty he wouldn't touch one for the rest of his life. The author fed Suicides to his buddy one chapter at a time, "so the suspense will be an incentive to go on typing in the heat."

"Having written hard and daily" for two months, Millar gave himself the holiday "to see what pops up in my mind to write next." He wanted to turn "Death by Water" into a book but couldn't make plans until hearing whether Ellery Queen had bought the short story ("doubtful, but a possibility"). One non-detective novel he considered writing was a "rustic story" based on an Ontario family whose farm he'd worked on before college: "You may sneer," he wrote Maggie, "but if I could do it right it'd be a best-seller."

While mulling his next literary move, Millar "buried" himself "(shallowly) in inconsequential reading," including the non-fiction Viking Murder Book anthology; and viewed "some of the more unlovely examples of American movie making," including Fog Island — "in which one guy is followed by another guy who is followed by another guy who is followed by another guy. You think I'm exaggerating? You're an optimist." Other shipboard movies in December included Fired Wife ("continuously embarrassing"), She Gets Her Man ("just moderately terrible"), Boom Town, White Cargo, and Iceland, with Sonja Henie doing the hula ("really embarrassing"). Of the Shipley Bay cinema, Millar cracked: "You pays no money and you gets no choice."

He also read a text Maggie had given him on how to write "Fast Detective stories" for Clayton Rawson, an editor at True Detective and Master Detective magazines, which he thought (as she did) good: "while it didn't encourage me to write Fast (D.) stories — I prefer fiction what is fiction — I… was stimulated to sit right down and do a complete outline for another spy book… a 24-hour job, fast and mysterious with romance in it even." "The Box" would take place in San Francisco, he said, or maybe Panama; and Millar hoped to submit it when written to the Saturday Evening Post. "Nope, I've got no delusions of grandeur," he assured his wife, "… I'm just going to have a try is all."

Ken Millar was anxious to make his way as a professional writer; he'd allow himself one postwar year to see if he could earn a living by his pen alone. He aspired to be an outstanding mainstream-fiction writer and felt he had the requisite talent (upon reading a book of John Steinbeck short stories, he told Margaret: "I could do as well, I believe"), but despite his wife's urging him otherwise — he intended to establish himself at first through crime fiction: a genre which, from his point of view, need not be inferior, encompassing (as he felt) such authors as Dickens, Greene, and Faulkner. (In 1946, he'd tell Ellery Queen: "I consider Hemingway's 'Short Happy Life of F. Macomber' probably the best murder story in the language… ' ")

(Even as Margaret was urging her gifted husband to write mainstream fiction instead, Millar was telling his capable wife she made a mistake by limiting herself to suspense: "What nonsensical compulsion makes you suppose you must always write mysteries, when you can outwrite, outthink, and out-observe nine-tenths of the bestselling straight novelists now writing?… Why your absurd humility towards the novel form, which is exploited so successfully by your inferiors?")

Kenneth Millar's mystery-writing career (and no doubt his confidence) got a big boost in January 1946 when he received word from Margaret that one of his stories (which one, not yet known) had won a $300 Fourth Prize in the Ellery Queen contest. Millar guessed (correctly) it was "Death by Air." "The chief reason I'm so pleased," he wrote his wife, "… is that it makes it so certain that I'll be able to turn pro without any strain." He was also happy to note: "Dannay is bringing out all the prize winners in a book (good publicity for me… among detective fans!)" Millar consoled his wife on her own entry's failure to snag a prize: "You needn't feel badly about your story — as I said it was much too good for that market." (William Faulkner's EQMM submission took second-place honors.)

In the wake of his prize-winning entrance into the mystery-writing community, Millar chose next to read S.S. Van Dine's bestselling 1927 detective novel The "Canary" Murder Case, featuring sleuth Philo Vance. "Not a bad puzzle," Millar allowed in a letter to Margaret, "but the writing doesn't pass muster. Dreadfully pretentious, to cover up lack of knowledge about people and their feelings. Deadly slow and insufferably snobbish. Not as good as [Margaret's 1941 debut book The Invisible Worm], I think. Yet it's gone through 20 or so editions. There's one field where it paid off to be a pioneer. One similarity to Raymond Chandler: the masses of detail, which fill up most of the wordage. But unlike Raymond, there isn't enough action, drama, or character to make a good novelette. And if you think I can't write dialogue, try some more Dine. He writes the way I talk when I'm trying to be funny in a queer academic way. French and Italian phrases average one or two a page, and one of them at least is a hideous boner." (Later in this letter, after some highflown sentences about public and private virtue, Millar exclaimed: "Gracious, I'm getting serieux, ma cherie, as Philo Vance would dicere, n-est-ce pas?") Reader Millar abandoned Van Dine for a book by psychologist William James.

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…"

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.

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."