American Public Media Subject: The Writer's
Almanac for Tuesday, December 13, 2005
It's the birthday of mystery novelist who wrote under the
name Ross Macdonald, born Kenneth Millar in Los Gatos,
California (1915). His father abandoned the family when he
was growing up. His mother struggled to support him,
occasionally begging for money on the street. One day, she
even took Millar to an orphanage to give him up, but she
changed her mind at the last minute. He spent the rest of his
childhood being passed from one relative to the next. He read
a lot growing up, and wanted to write, but he didn't take it
seriously as a career until the summer he won a typewriter in
a radio quiz show. He started publishing a series of stories
and humor pieces in magazines, being paid one cent per word,
and it made him just enough money to support his family for
the summer, until he found a job teaching. Millar went on to
write several spy and crime novels, which were fairly
successful. But after publishing a few books he began to
doubt himself as a writer. He wanted to write something
serious, something drawing on his own background, but
whenever he tried to write about his childhood directly, he
was embarrassed by the quality of the result. And then, one
day, Millar invented a private investigator named Lew Archer.
Millar said, "I was in trouble, and Lew Archer got me out of
it... I couldn't work directly with my own experiences and
feelings. A narrator had to be interposed, like protective
lead, between me and the radioactive material." His first Lew
Archer novel was The Moving Target (1949), and he made a
point of not describing Lew Archer, who narrated the story.
He wanted readers to be able to imagine themselves into the
role of the detective. He went on to write eighteen novels
featuring Lew Archer, most of them about characters trying to
uncover some mystery at the heart of their families, often
having to do with lost fathers. Millar became known as one of
the authors who helped elevate the mystery novel to the level
of great literature.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 13 Dec 2005 EST