There is more, much more than the sum of the book’s parts.
Superintendent Pibble and his creator both go their own way, their quick brilliance aimed slightly off-kilter, suffering the slings and arrows of outraged storytelling. One gets the clear impression that had either man focused on the prize valued by the rest of the world (for the fictional character, his next promotion; for the flesh-and-blood man, best-seller lists), each would now have large buildings named after him. Instead, the patient reader is gifted with an indelible impression of having met someone extraordinary, and that, having met him, some integral part of the mind has been forever reshaped.
That one has been made a permanent citizen of the world of Peter Dickinson.
Laurie R. King has been a published and prizewinning author for more than twenty years, and has written more than twenty novels, including her immensely popular and well-loved series of novels featuring Mary Russell, onetime apprentice and now wife to Sherlock Holmes, the latest of which is Pirate King. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit her online at www.laurierking.com.
The Goodbye Look
by Ross Macdonald (1969)
LINWOOD BARCLAY
* * *
Ross Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American mystery writer Kenneth Millar (1915–83), whose reputation rests on the series of novels that he wrote between 1949 and 1976 featuring private investigator Lew Archer, named, in part, after Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, in The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Set in and around Santa Teresa, a fictionalized version of Santa Barbara in Southern California, the books combine elements of the psychological thriller and the whodunit to create what screenwriter William Goldman described as “the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.”
* * *
If it weren’t for the font used on the covers of the Bantam paperback editions of Ross Macdonald’s novels, I might never have discovered him. And had that been the case, what would turn out to be one of the most important events in my life would never have happened.
In the summer of 1970, I was fifteen years old. I was at my local bookstore, which was the twirling metal paperback display stand at the IGA grocery store in Bobcaygeon, Ontario. Bobcaygeon, a resort town in the heart of the Kawartha Lakes district with a population of about twelve hundred permanent residents, did not at that time have an actual bookstore. So it was here that I would find the latest Fawcett edition of Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm novels, or a new Nero Wolfe, or a reissue of some Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple mystery.
On this particular visit, my eyes were drawn to The Goodbye Look. It was, the cover informed me, the newest Lew Archer novel, and it must have been a damn good series because there was a blurb from the New York Times Book Review that read: “The finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.” (The quote, by the way, was from William Goldman’s front-page review.)
The title and the author’s name were presented in a bold, three-dimensional font. The block letters appeared to lift off the page in a style that was almost identical to the one used in the title sequences for a television spy show, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., that had gone off the air two years earlier. I had been, not to put too fine a point on it, obsessed with that program to the point of writing my own seventy-page novellas—seven or eight of them—based on the show’s characters. I would spend hours, when I was twelve and thirteen years old, drawing that exact typeface for my novellas’ title pages.
So, I figured, with a font like that, it had to be a good book, right?
Right.
I devoured The Goodbye Look. Having finished it, I hunted up all the Archer novels I could find: The Instant Enemy, Find a Victim, The Galton Case, The Wycherly Woman.
There was something different about these books. There was something going on. As good as Christie and Stout and Hamilton were—and look, they were very good—their characters’ efforts to expose the guilty were parlor games, the literary equivalent of pulling an ace of spades from the deck and proclaiming: “And that’s your card!”
Yes! Wow! Great trick!
And then you tossed the book aside, instantly forgot it, and picked up another one. But when Lew Archer exposed a killer, it meant something, because violent deaths in a Macdonald novel were presented in a larger context. Murder was a product of environment. Violence grew from family dysfunction, the corruption of wealth and power. Alienated youths, searching for meaning in an increasingly materialistic and meaningless world, drifted with tragic results.
These people were seriously screwed up. Maybe, at some level, I was subconsciously identifying. I’d lost my father when I was sixteen; my domineering mother wanted to control every aspect of my life; my brother was hearing voices. Here, in a Lew Archer novel, were people who had more problems than I did.
What’s not to love?
At the heart of The Goodbye Look, and all of the Archer novels, are buried family secrets, secrets that, like weeds, inevitably break through and expose themselves to the light. And it’s Archer who, through his investigations, shines this purifying light.
Before I started writing this essay, I reread The Zebra-Striped Hearse, which was first published in 1962. I’d not read it since the mid-1970s, but it holds up beautifully, and Archer sums up the most recurring Macdonald theme in eight words: “The past is the key to the present.” And then there is this: “People start out young on the road to being murderers. They start out equally young on the road to becoming victims. When the two roads intersect, you have a violent crime.”
Ross Macdonald—the pseudonym under which Kenneth Millar wrote his books—was, without question, throughout my late teens and early twenties, my favorite writer on the planet. So, in my final year at Peterborough’s Trent University, where I was pursuing an English degree during those lulls when I was not having a good time, it seemed appropriate to write a thesis on the evolution of the private eye as an iconic character in literature. I started with Dupin, worked through Holmes, Spade, Marlowe, all building to what I considered the supreme example: Archer.
As I started doing my research, I thought, Why not write the author himself, care of Alfred A. Knopf, his hardcover publisher, and ask him a few questions. Several weeks later, to my surprise, I received a reply, written in Millar’s small, almost illegible hand. He pointed me to some pieces that had been written about him, including a Newsweek cover story, and was pleased to hear from someone in Ontario, where Millar had spent his formative years.
Then I did a terrible thing.
I had written a detective novel and asked if I could send it to him. I realize, today, what a tremendous imposition this was. What the hell was I thinking? This was a man who hit the New York Times best-seller list, whose novel The Moving Target had been made into the hit movie Harper starring Paul Newman. This was a man who was contracted to crank out a book a year. Like he was going to agree to read a book by some twenty-year-old kid from Canada.
But that’s what Kenneth Millar did.
So I mailed him my manuscript. And he wrote back. His letter began: “I was delighted to get your novel, and more delighted when I read it. It shows great promise and something more than promise. It has distinction.”
There were criticisms. The book needed a subplot. It was “too fast, too spare.” Okay, all true. I could definitely improve the manuscript. The important thing was, Kenneth Millar had read my book.
We began a correspondence that went on for a couple of years. One day, this: “I expect to be in Peterborough about May 2 and hope to be able to spend a little time with you.” I was running our family business—a cottage resort and trailer park—and had just finished taking the garbage to the dump when the phone rang. It was Millar. Could I join him and his wife, the mystery writer Margaret Millar, for dinner? They were staying with a relative in a beautiful old house along the Otonabee River, about a mile south of Trent University.
I was available.
I wish I could tell you everything that h
appened that night, everything Kenneth Millar and I talked about. The excitement of the moment had a way of obliterating some of the details. But I can tell you I brought him a copy of the skin magazine Gallery because it contained an interview with him that he’d never seen. His face flushed slightly, and he excused himself to tuck it away in his luggage where neither his hosts, nor Margaret, would come across it.
I drove him out to Trent University and gave him a tour. We paused on the Faryon Bridge, which spans the Otonabee, connecting one half of the university with the other, and which was named in honor of one of Margaret’s relatives.
At dinner, I mentioned how much I loved the opening of The Underground Man, in which Archer helps a young boy feed peanuts to the jays. “I’ll write another one like that for you,” he joked.
I recall how, when it came time for me to leave and Millar was showing me out, he became confused and opened a closet instead of the front door. (He would write only one more novel, and seven years later he would die from Alzheimer’s disease.)
I remember thinking it never really happened.
Ross Macdonald, the novelist, demonstrated for me that the conventions of a crime novel could do more than entertain. They could be used to serve the goals of literature: to enlighten, to give us insight into our world, to make us think.
Kenneth Millar, the man, through his kindness and generosity, gave me the confidence to pursue my goal of becoming a writer. He allowed me to believe it was possible that a kid running a trailer park could accomplish things he might otherwise have thought impossible.
No writer has had a greater impact on me professionally, or personally.
There is one detail from that night I don’t have to recall, because it sits on my shelf here in my study. It’s a hardback copy of Millar’s novel Sleeping Beauty, which I brought to our dinner in the hope that he would autograph it.
He took a pen from inside his jacket and wrote: “Peterborough, Ontario, May 1 1976. For Linwood, who will, I hope, someday outwrite me. Sincerely, Kenneth Millar (Ross Macdonald).”
Linwood Barclay, a former columnist for the Toronto Star, is the author of more than a dozen books, including No Time for Goodbye, which has been optioned for film, and more recently, The Accident and Trust Your Eyes. He is married, has two grown children, and lives near Toronto. Visit him online at www.linwoodbarclay.com.
Fadeout
by Joseph Hansen (1970)
MARCIA MULLER
* * *
Joseph Hansen (1923–2004) was an American novelist and poet who revolutionized the hard-boiled mystery novel by introducing into the form an openly gay lead character, the insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter, who became the protagonist of twelve of Hansen’s (many) novels. Hansen, who disliked the term “gay” and preferred to describe himself as homosexual, was a lifelong activist in the gay rights movement. Brandstetter is notable for being contented, not tortured, in his sexuality. “My joke,” said Hansen, “was to take the true hard-boiled character in an American fiction tradition and make him homosexual. He was going to be a nice man, a good man, and he was going to do his job well.” It might well have served as a description of Hansen himself, who was happily married for fifty-one years to the lesbian artist Jane Bancroft. They had one daughter, Barbara, who later changed her sex to male and her name to Daniel James Hansen.
* * *
In the early 1970s my interest in crime fiction featuring private investigators was sparked by the work of the “big three” authors of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. Male, tough, uncompromising, and mostly without past histories or personal lives, their heroes struggled to right wrongs and exact justice in territories that were strange and dangerous to them. I envied these brave men going off into those uncharted and dark realms to uncover the truth and administer justice, but still I found something missing from their stories. Namely, a personal life and background.
Then, in the early 1970s, I stumbled across Fadeout, a Dave Brandstetter novel by Joseph Hansen. The protagonist surprised me: he was an openly homosexual death claims insurance investigator, and he possessed a full life apart from his case files and sexual preferences.
Dave has a father, Carl Brandstetter, who owns Medallion Life, the company for which Dave works. Carl wishes his son—already in his forties—would “get out of that [homosexual] life,” but he himself is no paragon of normality, seeing as he has had—by his early sixties—nine wives of his own. At the beginning of the series, Dave is mourning Rod Fleming, his partner of twenty years, whom he has lost to cancer only six weeks before; for most of those weeks, he has wanted to die himself, but now has chosen to live. Unfortunately, he is often thwarted in his attempts to build a future by chaotic professional and personal situations.
The Brandstetter series, twelve books that cover a period of twenty years in Dave’s life, encompasses many genuine and colorful characters and touches on themes relevant to its day, such as political corruption (Fadeout, 1970); bigotry (The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of, 1978); pornography (Skinflick, 1979); urban decay (Nightwork, 1984); AIDS (Early Graves, 1987); and the white supremacy movement (The Boy Who Was Buried This Morning, 1990).
Theme is important in the Brandstetter novels—in interviews, Hansen admitted using his works to express his rage and pain at the ills of the world—but the primary reason we readers return to them is the characters, especially the character of Dave, a deeply caring and compassionate man, who is sometimes obsessively dedicated to uncovering the truth of the cases that are brought to him.
Some critics claim that the series is flawed because most of Dave’s cases involve homosexuals and their problems, and this criticism may have some validity. However, the fact that Dave is gay allows him to become aware of homosexual undertones much more readily than your average investigator. All detectives draw upon their knowledge of the world to reach their conclusions, and a gay man in a largely straight world has more knowledge than most.
The last novel in the series, A Country of Old Men (1991), was deliberately intended by Hansen to be the final chapter in Dave Brandstetter’s life, and provides an overall view by bringing back old friends and revisiting old haunts. The story begins with Dave being lured out of retirement by one old friend, Madge Dunstan, to piece together the truth behind a wildly improbable tale of kidnapping, violence, and murder told to her by a near-feral young boy whom she finds one morning wandering on the beach near her house.
At nearly seventy, Dave has been lured out of retirement before—too many times, perhaps, he acknowledges. Now his firm commitments to truth and justice once again overwhelm him and, despite failing health and the pleas of his now life partner, TV newsman Cecil Harris, to stay out of the matter, he plunges into it with the zeal he’s brought to all his previous cases. But investigation is not as easy as it used to be; Dave’s physical strictures and the accompanying slowness of age hamper him. Still, he moves stolidly and effectively through L.A.’s pop music scene and its assorted eccentric denizens.
The result is a vivid portrait of Los Angeles as it was in the 1990s: corrupt but curiously innocent; uncertainly evolving toward the new century; torn between old stereotypes and new directions. However, Dave has watched and understood past evolutions, and he himself remains the same thoughtful, compassionate, and emotional man we encountered on page one of Fadeout.
Hansen did not intend Dave Brandstetter to be a gimmicky character capitalizing upon the then slight emergence of gay literature into the mainstream. Rather, he sought to create a believable individual who happens to be homosexual (Hansen’s preferred word, rather than “gay”). Hansen was once quoted as saying that almost everything written about homosexuals is distorted, and that he set out to “right a wrong.” This he did admirably, through the intelligent use of atmosphere and character.
For instance, in A Country of Old Men: the crackling of mesquite logs in the fireplace of Dave’s Laurel Canyon living room; the scent of freshly cho
pped herbs in his cookshack; the flavors and aromas of Max Romano’s restaurant in Hollywood. The actions—and often antics—of recurring characters: Kovaks, the crazy artist; restaurateur Max Romano; Madge Dunstan, the lesbian who can never quite manage to keep a lover; Amanda, Carl Brandstetter’s ninth wife, a stepmother young enough to be Dave’s grown daughter but old enough to boss him around when it’s good for him; Cecil Harris, neophyte black newscaster who becomes Dave’s final—and perhaps truest—love. All of these combine to create the world of Dave Brandstetter, which the reader finds himself anxious to enter and far more reluctant to leave.
• • •
Joseph Hansen is primarily known for the Brandstetter novels, but beginning in 1952 when he first published a poem in the New Yorker, his output was eclectic: in addition to poetry, mainstream and explicitly sexual novels, two gothic novels, and various essays, he also taught numerous workshops and hosted a 1960s radio show, Homosexuality Today, as well as helping to found Hollywood’s first gay pride parade. Besides Brandstetter, he created a second private investigator, Hack Bohannon, a former deputy sheriff who runs a horse farm.
Hansen was married to the former Jane Bancroft from 1943 until her death in 1994, ten years before his own. Of their mixed lesbian/gay marriage he had this to say: “Here was this remarkable person who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. So something was right about it, however bizarre it seemed to the rest of the world.”
A changing world, yes, and through his writings Joseph Hansen did much to call attention to that change while providing a consistently high level of entertainment for gay and straight readers alike.