Content provided in partnership with

Gumshoe in paradise - Santa Barbara, California

Sunset, Sept, 1999 by Peter Fish

In September, life in the most beautiful city in the world acquires a wary edge. The wind blows hot over San Marcos Pass. In the cafes along State Street, people look up, squinting, worrying. Are those ashes? Is that flame? But let an expert describe the possibilities:

"Before we reached Santa Teresa I could smell smoke. Then I could see it dragging like a veil across the face of the mountain behind the city.

"Under and through the smoke I caught glimpses of fire like the flashes of heavy guns too far away to be heard."

Most Popular Articles in Home & Garden: Coolest room on the block: have a bedroom that's way drab and boring? Hang ...; Reuse, recycle, remodel: environmentally friendly materials and techniques ...; Keeping it simple: interior designer Michael Lee finds an overdesigned ...; House of the Year: this craftsman-inspired home is factory-built--proving ...; Dreaming of cabin life: smart ideas for small spaces, plus the hottest spots ...; More »

That's from a mystery called The Underground Man. It's by Kenneth Millar, a.k.a. Ross Macdonald, and he's writing about his adopted hometown, Santa Barbara, a.k.a. Santa Teresa. Macdonald died nearly two decades ago, and for a while he seemed in danger of being forgotten. Now he's being read again. A current queen of detective fiction, Sue Grafton, pays him homage by setting her tales in a fictional Santa Teresa. A new Macdonald biography has been published. One can walk into a bookstore and load up on reissued titles like The Zebra-Striped Hearse.

"He had a disconcerting habit," says Ralph Sipper, Santa Barbara rare-book dealer and longtime Macdonald friend. "When you'd talk, he'd just stare at you. You felt he was looking inside you."

A useful skill for a detective writer. Canadian-raised, Macdonald came to Santa Barbara in the 1940s. In 1949 he published a mystery called The Moving Target. It was his fifth novel, but the first using the Macdonald pen name, the first using the Santa Barbara setting, the first featuring a private detective named Low Archer.

The 18 Archer novels offer the satisfactions you seek in a detective story. Archer walks in the tough-guy footsteps of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe - he can take a punch, and handle both a .45 and a murderous blond - though he has traded their brutal cynicism for a certain weary kindness. The stories also supply the requisite circuitous plots, a corpse or two, and a gaudy sense of doom.

But the books also give you more. When it came to catching the rhythms of Southern California life, Macdonald had the literary equivalent of perfect pitch. It's all here - the blowsy beach towns, the desert cities with their date palms and somnolent heat. Above all, there is Santa Barbara, a city so beautiful that it can appear a red-tiled mirage; it's also a place of secrets, where people fool themselves into thinking money will keep them eternally happy - only to find paradise stolen from them as fast as flames can lick chaparral.

Santa Barbara has not put up any monuments to Macdonald, not even a plaque in the courthouse where he observed murder trials for inspiration. Still, it is possible to devise a literary pilgrimage. After I leave Sipper's bookstore, I drive to the Coral Casino Beach Club, where Macdonald eavesdropped on Montecito millionaires, then out to the stucco apartments of Isla Vista, where the wayward adolescents that populate his books hole up. Next I drive into the mountains that watch over the city.

A good writer can love a place so intensely he or she feels compelled to reveal everything about it, both shadoWs and light. Macdonald did that with Santa Barbara. Like any ace private detective, he knew the bad when he saw it; like only a few of them, he thought he could make it good. "He saw Santa Barbara as a Periclean Athens," says Ralph Sipper. "He wanted to make it ideal."

I am standing near where some of Santa Barbara's worst fires have started. It is a hot day, and the chaparral has the smell of kerosene, but I look down on a sight - the red-tiled city, the blue curve of ocean - that can break your heart with its perfection. At the close of The Underground Man, the fire that races through most of the book is extinguished. Low Archer cracks the case. The guilty are brought down; some of the innocent get chances to make new lives here. A lot of places never get the writer they deserve, but this one did.

RALPH SIPPER/BOOKS is open by appointment (805/962-2141). Many of Macdonald's mysteries have been reissued by Vintage Books/Random House. Tom Nolan's Ross Macdonald: A Biography (Scribner, New York, 1999; $32 hardbound) is available through most bookstores.

Gumshoe in paradise - Santa Barbara, California

Sunset, Sept, 1999 by Peter Fish

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: News

Most Popular Articles in Home & Garden

Most Popular Publications in Home & Garden