Strangers in Town: Three Newly Discovered Mysteries

Death by water Preface by Tom Nolan

"I can think of few more complex critical enterprises,"{" 'I can think of few more complex critical enterprises' ": Macdonald, "Down These Streets a Mean Man Must Go," Antaeus, Spring/Summer 1977; reprinted in Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly Into The Past (Capra Press, 1981).} wrote Ross Macdonald, "than disentangling the mind and life of a first-person detective story writer from the mask of his detective-narrator."

In the case of Macdonald and his protagonist Lew Archer, the enterprise would prove especially rewarding; for Ross Macdonald's fiction was tied by innumerable threads to the life of Kenneth Millar.

The author's practice of weaving fact into fiction began early — as early as this pre-Archer private-eye tale from 1945. "Death by Water" swims with references to the 29-year-old Ken Millar's past and present, as well as with hints of books and events to come{"'hints of books and events to come'": A "long, long circle" of the sort Millar savored in life, and Macdonald traced in fiction, can be drawn from the author's first private-eye story to his last p.i. novel thirty years later. Compare the death of Henry Ralston to Jacob Whitmore's in Macdonald's The Blue Hammer (Knopf, 1976): "Jacob Whitmore… wasn't drowned in fresh water… [He was] drowned in somebody's bathtub and chucked into the ocean afterwards."}.

The Valeria Pueblo, with its bungalow cottages and live orchestra, is very like hotels where Ken and Margaret Millar stayed during the war. One of the tunes its musicians play, "In a Little Spanish Town," was a hit in the late 1920s, when 12-year-old Kenneth Millar lived in Winnipeg with his aunt and uncle, a man who kept a heavy handgun in the glovebox of his Packard. That man was a lifelong touchstone for Macdonald to the world of crime — as was this romantic old tune, heard in more than one Archer novel.

Another leitmotif throughout the Archer series is the detective's finely-tuned moral sense. His young predecessor Rogers also seems capable of precise ethical judgments.

Rogers agrees for instance that a fortune gained perhaps through duplicity has nonetheless been put to good use — for, as he's told, "It kept a sick woman in comfort and brought up a fatherless boy." (Here's another link to the story's author, who grew up virtually fatherless.) Yet Rogers knows the difference between good motives and evil acts. And, like the later Archer, he's as concerned with why such acts are done as with who did them. "The trouble's all over," Rogers says once the corpse is found. "I'm just trying to understand it."

The offhand remarks near the start of the story, then, about motives that fuel crime, lie at the heart of the matter. (Since they also plant clues to solving the mystery, they serve double-duty: another hallmark of Macdonald's technique.)

Note the difference between Rogers and his hotel-detective colleague, who gets up and leaves when the talk turns serious. Incurious of cause, Al Sablacan may someday feel its effect. If he so allows, he might become like Otto Sipe, the corrupt house dick in Macdonald's The Far Side of the Dollar (1964): living in the ruin of the once-grand Barcelona Hotel, where the bright dreams of 1945 have turned to dust, and the only guests are ghosts.