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Author elevated sleuth genre, scholar says
Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Aug 7, 2005 by Dennis Lythgoe Deseret Morning News
THE NOVELS OF ROSS MACDONALD, by Michael Kreyling, University of South Carolina Press, 185 pages, $34.95.
Ross Macdonald, whose real name was Kenneth Millar, wrote 18 detective novels from 1944-76, each focusing on the charismatic character of Lew Archer.
Although those who write about detective fiction usually classify Macdonald in the same respected category as Dashiell Hammett (author of the Sam Spade stories) and Raymond Chandler (Philip Marlowe), to the general public the name Macdonald is generally forgotten.
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According to Michael Kreyling, professor of English at Vanderbilt University, whose scholarly specialty is detective fiction, Macdonald "stretched the power of the genre well beyond Hammett and Chandler," and thus deserves even greater accolades than they do. Kreyling says Macdonald should be considered the father "of the apparently unitary figure of the white, male, hard-boiled detective," and he had a huge influence on all the writers who followed.
Kreyling also believes that detective fiction deserves the "same quality of literary attention" customarily given to "the novel." Rather than being purely entertainment or escape-oriented, the detective novel aims to confront the reader with reality, argues the author.
As for Macdonald's novels, critics say there is "too little blood and liquor spilled" in them -- and Lew Archer "stands out as a private eye who seems to err on the side of self-control."
Finally, Kreyling suggests that Macdonald's "debt to Hammett was more benign than the one to Chandler, and that Macdonald ought to be read by the standards he projected rather than by those he eclipsed." In fact, says Kreyling, "Macdonald's novels are so durable that you can read and reread them with renewed pleasure until the paper and glue wear out."
Kreyling demonstrates through the novels he discusses that Macdonald freely used the themes and events of his own private life as subject matter. His intellectual edge may be partially explained by his own decision to earn a doctorate in English, giving him an understanding of such thinkers as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sigmund Freud. But then he spent his life writing detective fiction instead of teaching college students.
Although Lew Archer stands out as a fascinating character in his work, Macdonald cared more about "the idea" than "the character." He said he always started with a "moral situation."
Kreyling considers Macdonald's more mature novels to be "The Goodbye Look" (1969) and "The Blue Hammer" (1976). In virtually all of the novels, Macdonald used the pains of his own life for focus.
In "The Galton Case" (1959), Lew Archer opens a dead man's suitcase and inhales odors from the man's loneliness mingled with the sea. Macdonald's father was a harbor pilot in Vancouver when his little son was smelling the sea and the aroma of his pipe.
Macdonald was only 4 when his father left the family for good. That tragic loss was the "central structure" of the boy's life and he later put it into his writing.
Macdonald was also the father of a troubled daughter and the grandfather of a boy who died of a drug overdose. He came to think there was a presence of "panic and error" in his own life. Paradoxically, his writing ended as he spent the last seven years of his life suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
This book seems a good beginning for anyone interested in the very best of detective fiction, written by a pioneer as well as an eventual master of the craft.
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com
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