Originals: The Writer in America; 5; Ross MacDonald

A. Ross MacDonald is that rare combination of a popular writer whose books are widely

praised by serious literary critics according to The Donald. There is no mystery about the origins of the so-called private eye or American hard boiled detective fiction. You asked me where it came from it came right out of life and it still dies and the country is crawling with private eyes. People just grand. The fictional Santa Teresa and other Southern California locales and Ross Macdonald novels are quite recognizably the actual Santa Barbara in which she lives. This includes a beach club coral casino where MacDonald and his wife the novelist Margaret Miller have been members for many years. And again all of the scenes in the novels are not literal derives McDonnell says from real life. No one writes of Southern California with greater accuracy and sense of place than Ross make.

The Law Offices of Wellesley unseeable are over a savings bank on the main street of Santa Teresa. Their private elevator lifted you from a bare little lobby into an atmosphere of elegant simplicity. It created the impression that after years of struggle you were rising effortlessly at your natural level one of the choices facing the elevator alone with carefully dyed red here was toying with the keyboard of an electric typewriter a bowl full of floating Bugatti is sat on the desk in front of her Ottoman prince picked up the collars and ties them discreetly around the yoke was her chair stick casually in one corner. I sat down on it in the interests of self-improvement and picked up a fresh copy of The Wall Street Journal. Apparently this was the right thing to do. There it is secretary's top happy and condescended to notice me. Do you wish to see anyone. I would if I

was Mr. C. Abell would you be Mr. Archer. Yes. She relaxed her formal manner I was in one of the chores and I Mrs. Heene and Mr. sable didn't come into the office today but he asked me to give you a message when you got here. Would you mind going out to his house. I guess not. I got up out of the Harvard chair it was like being expelled. I realize it's a nuisance she said sympathetically. Do you know how to reach this place. Is he still on his beach cottage. No he gave that up when he got married they bought a house in the country. I didn't know he was married. Mr Sale has been married for nearly two years now. Very much so. The feline lowered her voice made me wonder if she was married. So she called herself Mrs. Heene and she had the air of a woman who lost her husband to death or divorce and was looking for a successor. She leaned toward me in sudden intimacy.

You're the detective right you know right now is that I was my part sorry or drive more or less immediately from my. I find when I look at my stories after I've written them they generally have a fairly high autobiographical content I generally deal with problems that have arisen in my own life or circumstances that have appeared in the lives of people around me that I care about. The essence of it is the feeling that you have for the situation rather than perhaps the situation itself. I don't remember anybody ever giving me a plot that I used except my wife. She's a great Potter and I've given her plots too. We were started in our early 20s

a series strangers who were doing different things. I was teaching high school and she wrote some humor and then branched off into the humorous mystery novel her first several books were humorous mysteries about a character named Paul Pry a psychiatrist and undoubtedly her example led me into taking the whole thing more seriously and you actually writing mysteries of my own I started some years after she did. In Santa Barbara California there's a gathering of writers every two weeks one writer who attends these luncheons regularly. He was the founder of the Santa Barbara resident Miller felt in my heart I know its first novels were published under that name but he's best known under his pen name of Ross Macdonald and is the creator of

Lou Archer certainly one of the most famous private eyes in all detective fiction and as one critic put it. Ken Miller is not only the best in his field he is an important American novelist in any level. 9:03 are you going to write things popular it is something that anybody can readers well trained minds and yet they can't write their way out of a paper bag. Popular art is the language a writer can reach everybody speaks the common language and understands the former's essence of fighting art. I think originates in the writers just to reach a public and take it with them. Why don't we work. Leaving aside a great trio like Mark Twain who is both a popular writer and literary genius the popular writer of popular

literature generally doesn't invent too much. He deals with received forms which are familiar to his audience naturally tries to develop the forms as he goes. He deals with ideas that are not absolutely new but are so to speak second generation ideas generally he's a little ahead of his audience but not not set light years ahead. It just happens that the murder mystery and the whole Gothic tradition that it comes out is the major popular fiction invention of the last century or so. And we write in it not because we're primarily interested in murders but because the convention is so on but. Knowing

exactly where he is is as important to a writer as it is to a blind man. This essay by Ross MacDonald is from the South Dakota review EDITION. The writer's sense of place to most of us loss of place is as radical as a loss of vision. We seem to be able to see only what we know. Many of my fictional characters seem to be lost on this continent and I suspect that their experiences are partly out of biographical. I am both literally and imaginatively a bipap resting one on easy foot in California where I was born and I spent the best part of my adult life and the other foot in Canada where I was raised and partly educated in this geographical range and straight to contra some of the peculiarities of my work. Many of my plots originated in the north and the Middle West as I did but tend to end as I have in California. Their temporal span which often

approximates a life time serious reflect the time it took me to put together the places and the meanings. The main stories generally begin in the open self inviting society of California but their outcomes are determined pretty determined by an ethical and psychological causality which I associate with my forebears in the north Mennonite and Presbyterian. We often in this keep lists of my books drag with them their whole pasts rattling like chains among the cast and that one we first came to consciousness in British Columbia and to maturity in California. The most persistent place or thing is the Pacific Ocean and it shores this torsion with its great spiritual and temporal continuity is its occurrence and recurrence is destructions and

renewals represents a changing constant in my life and fiction. It is the nearest thing in my fiction to an inescapable and memorable place. My sailor father played its waters in the first world war and I traversed them in the second. I live within sight of the Pacific and wet myself and it nearly every day just beyond the mountains which form the other horizon of my world. Canada seems to hang like a glass year slowly moving down on me from its not expected to overtake me before I die. Reminding me with shilling weight that I belong to the north after all. We writers never leave the places where our first lasting memories begin and have names put to them together with our culture and our genes both of which are in some sense the outgrowth of place. These places seem to constitute our feet our whole eyes move along their ancient trails. But even when

we are standing neck deep in the open grace of our past we scan the horizon for new places new possibilities and as the final shovels full plopped down onto our faces in the dirt trucks are Mahler's the spores of another Promised Land. An enormous amount of work that goes into a symbolic narrative is unconscious. You find yourself being governed by certain maistre ideas are master images and you don't choose them they choose you. And in fact I've been accused of being too overtly symbolic but I don't avoid the possibility of symbolism I brought up and I'm symbolist ports on far back. Now Army.

So when you have a forest fire in your backyard that almost burned your house down and write a book about it you're not really indulging in anything far out. You're just reading about what's there. And that's true of my book that has the oil spill as a single event. They also pose the most important event in my life and the life of the city of the past generation of all time. It would be very foolish for me to turn around and write about something different when that was the subject presented itself. You always get started with and I'm sure quite a small idea. It suggests further ideas immediately as soon as you have a narrative I did involve characters for the most part I get my ideas from life and I generally find myself writing about let's say a psychological or

imaginative moment in my own life. I imagine that's mainly the taking off why I don't in my fiction but most fiction I write in longhand with a pen in line notebooks which I have used for a good many years but my excellent typos are still able to read it. I try to. Once I start a book to write it right on through from beginning to end and incorporate any changes in the original notebooks. So essentially I'm just working with one manuscript. It takes pretty close to a year of that for me to produce a book. I work three or four hours sometimes five hours a day and that time I write two or three pages and I start rather late in the morning.

I just come into this room which is both my bedroom and my work room and just stay here until I finish what it wants and it's like this stand for that day or until I come to a natural break. I'm generally finished by 4:00 o'clock in the afternoon and then I take my dogs for a walk. Man you got room 27 was at the end of the hall. I listened at the door. There was feet music behind it. They Country Blues. I nark music was shut off abruptly. Who is it on said Harry. It's about time. Darren pulled it off and I walked in on her and took the

door knob out of her hand and swung the door shut behind me in case the screaming because so much depends on the plot. It's impossible to get a good idea of a detective novel. Ross MacDonald has written a scribe divisor of plots for an all intricacy since the Gulf case published in one thousand fifty nine. Many of MacDonald's novels have been set in what's been called West Coast affluent and have been built around themes involving the mystery of obscured or hidden parentage and the breakdown in communication between parents and children. I marvel at McDonald's writing is that these heavyweight themes are developed within the rigid demands for suspense and plot structures required for a fast paced detective novels. One reviewer described his most recent novel The blue hammer in this way. Lou Archer MacDonald's private eye is once again hired to solve what appears to be a simple case trailing back through a ramshackle city questioning people

whose bodies or minds are deteriorating. Archer finds himself slowly being covered by the accumulated debris of generations old crimes. MacDonald's view we are the products of our past and what Lew Archer uncovers is that more often than not the murderer himself is a victim someone who has been psychically wounded by a central trauma in his life. And it's when the inevitable past looms before him that he becomes a murderer. Once I'm not Archer exactly but I had me mantra military it's also history doesn't become so deeply involved in tragic things. Left or right each of us

it's also a man to take his real problem in the more or less a true world. That's the central fact about him. He's not agreeing. It shouldn't just be a battle between good guys and bad guys were good guy wins out. They have to be losses on both sides. Real life and person is also in real life. The bad guys are not wholly bad. This is problems too. I think that's just reducing over emphatic lineaments of the earlier detective down to life size is a life size hero. He's got a better memory than most and I think he has a better style than most I hope he does anyway. Then most fire detectors actually do. I try to

write about a fairly good man. He embodies values which to me and I don't have to be a hero. Perhaps that's what we need as a Democratic hero a man who doesn't go on harm but just does his job right and treats other people fairly well. It seems to me that the Gothic tradition gradually develops into the most all encompassing literary tradition that we have. The basic reason I think is that the world changed in the duration of the Gothic So the Gothic became more and more feasible explanation of it. And I mean by that explicitly that the world of fear and violence which existed in and read class write and read Cliff's imagination and the world

of her loneliness that existed in the imagination of kauri tree was one of a right class of Meyer's and imitators to some extent or the world of say keep distress in Coleridge as Christabel coming down to us through poor all of these things have gradually emerged as dominant realities in the modern world and the use of the tradition is inevitable because it's talking about the things that we know and want to understand. CNN is a California campus. Like this to close up the buildings shared their own Mantik aspect they were halfheartedly modern cubes and oblongs and slabs that looked as if their architect and spend his life designing business

buildings. The parking attendant at the entrance told me that the student voices on our side academia village was even more haphazard than the campus proper loose dogs and loose students drawn the narrow streets in about equal numbers. The buildings ranges from hamburger stands in tiny cottages in two places to giant apartment buildings. The Sherburne where Doris beam are live is one of the big one to a six story high and occupied most of a block. I found a parking place behind a camper painted to simulate a log cabin on wheels. No sign of the old blue Ford I went into the Sherburne took an elevator to the third floor the building was fairly new but its interior smelled all unused It was crowded with the Orissa rapid generations of sweat and perfume and pot and spaces. If there were human voices they were ground up by the music or several competing sources on the third floor hallway which sounded like the voices of buildings on multiple personality.

I had to knock several times on the door of apartment three or four. The girl opened the door looked like a smaller version of her mother prettier but for your own leisure a soft mist BMI or yes her eyes looked past me at something just beyond my left shoulder. I sidestepped and looked behind me half expecting to be hit. But there was nobody there. May I come in and talk to you for a minute. I'm sorry I'm meditating. What are you meditating about. I don't really know. She giggled softly and touched the side of her head were laid here on the street like Ross. It hasn't come together yet. It hasn't materialized you know. She looked as though she hadn't quite made it to materialize yourself. She had a kind of blindness you can almost see through. She swayed gently like a curtain at a window then she lost her balance and fell quite hard against the door frame. I took hold of both her arms and pulled her upright. Her hands were cold and she seemed

slightly dazed. I wondered what she had swallowed or shipped or imbibed with one arm around her shores I proposed her into our living room on its far side a screen door open on a balcony. The room is almost as bare as a coolish hot. A few plain chairs a pallet on a metal frame a card table fiber mats. The only decoration was a large butterfly metre spangled red tissue paper and a wire skeleton. It was almost as big as she was and it hung on a string from the central ceiling fixture and very slowly rotated. She sat on one of the floor mats and looked up at the paper butterfly under the long cotton gone that seemed to her seemed to be her only garment. She tried to arrange her legs and feet in the lotus position and field. Did you make the butterfly Doris. She shook her head No I don't make things. It was one of the decorations of the dance when I got out of boarding school it

was my mother's idea to hang it in here. I hated her soft little voice seemed out of sync with the movements of her mouth. I don't feel very well with my grandson Jack. He beat me the last time we raised it. I don't think you're going to beat me. Yeah yeah I just have a feeling that it will sink in. I worked on a number of books over a period of a

number of months until I focused on the one I'm going to write this time. This is one of my notebooks from the year 1969. There's the name rattlesnake on it which was sort of the code title that I had for a book having to do with the fire. These are notes for a story that ultimately became two Books The Underground Man and Sleeping Beauty. Partly this story is that of a crummy evil slowly taking control of the captain's life as a consequence of his tragic father inspired overeagerness and self deception the threatening letters are not the first impingement on his life. His new wife Molly is the daughter of a man morally and or physically injured in the ship fire. Conceivably the same man who is now writing the threatening letters which at first appear to be connected only with the captain's marriage to Molly. It turns out that the captain got to know Molly through his apparently benevolent but actually frightening blackmail of all interest in one of the men of his

former command. Molly's connection with her father is hidden by an intervening marriage to a man who is dangerous and it leads as bait for shooting the captain. This ex-husband of the lowliest are up against the captain by the father. Press Molly married the captain has heard of a wild plot shared by a former husband to take him for all he had which explains the sale of the House and the project to school as you know at first and from the outside the captain's interest in Mali and the marriage of the daughter of the injured man seems like an almost saintly act of reconciliation the captain sees it that way himself says his ex-wife who watched it happen. Because if you grounded in fear or weakness it turns out badly. The captain's moral decline seems to give him the freedom to marry Molly. But the word freedom is in quotation marks. It was a moral hardship for me to walk away from his case. I went

back to my apartment in west Los Angeles and drag myself into a moderate stroke. Even so I didn't sleep till I woke up in the middle of the night. The specter of rain was rationing myself whisky was wearing off and I saw myself in a flicker of panic. A middle aged man in my darkness a life led by like traffic on the freeway.