"'I dreamed a queer dream'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, September 28, 1945, UCI.
"'Reading a book like that'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, September 30, 1945, UCI.
"'I don't after all'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, September 28, 1945, UCI.
"'I liked Boucher'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, October 15, 1945, UCI.
"'Sorry I got plastered'": Margaret to Kenneth Millar, October 13, 1945, M. Millar Papers, UCI.
"'Anthony Boucher's few words of praise'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, October 15, 1945, K. Millar Papers, UCI.
"'My initial fee'": Kenneth Millar, "Find the Woman," Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, June 1946; reprinted in Maiden Murders; reprinted in Macdonald, The Name Is Archer (Bantam Books, 1955), et al.
"'nearly finished my story'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, October 17, 1945, UCI.
"'a story which I'm almost afraid to write'": Ibid. "' Finished my story'": Ibid.
"'I drowned my sorrows'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, November 2, 1945, UCI.
"'marvellous'": Ibid.
"'pretty powerful'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, November 3, 1945, UCI.
"'I wrote 14 pages'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, November 2, 1945, UCI.
"'Like you'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, November 3, 1945, UCI.
"'I just mailed to you'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, November 4, 1945, UCI.
"'The more I read of Fitzgerald'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, November 5, 1945, UCI.
"'I seriously doubt'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, November 4, 1945, UCI.
"'I feel quite smugly happy'": Ibid.
"'Was utterly delighted'": Margaret to Kenneth Millar, November 22, 1945, M. Millar Papers, UCI.
"'It sounds like the sort of thing'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, November 4, 1945, K. Millar Papers, UCI.
"'plenty of ideas'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, November 5, 1945, UCI.
"'I am proud to report'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, November 11, 1945, UCI.
"'quietly perfect'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, December 15, 1945, UCI.
"'As a piece of technical work'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, December 1, 1945, UCI.
"'time enough'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, December 20, 1945, UCI.
"'so the suspense will be an incentive'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, December 30, 1945, UCI.
"'Having written hard and daily'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, December 23, 1945, UCI.
"'You may sneer'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, December 27, 1945, UCI.
"'buried… (shallowly)'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, December 28, 1945, UCI.
"'some of the more unlovely examples'": Ibid.
"'You pays no money'": Ibid.
"'while it didn't encourage me'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, December 30, 1945, UCI.
"'Nope, I've got no delusions of grandeur'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar January 4, 1946, UCI.
"'I could do as well, I believe'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, January 2 1946, UCI.
"'I consider Hemingway's'": Millar to Ellery Queen, November 14, 1946, Frederic Dannay Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
"'You can't understand'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, December 20, 1945, K. Millar Papers, UCI.
"'What nonsensical compulsion'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, December 1, 1945, UCI.
"'The chief reason I'm so pleased'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, January 4, 1946, UCI.
"'Not a bad puzzle'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, January 10, 1946, UCI.
"'It was a perfect night'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, January 19, 1946, UCI.
"'I don't want to force too much'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, January 20, 1946, UCI.
"'a hard-boiled short'": Millar to Wm. A.P. White (Anthony Boucher), February 12, 1946, courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University.
"'Brought up… Calamity Town'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, February 15, 1946, K. Millar Papers, UCI.
"'very successful editorial policy'": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, April 1, 1945, UCI.
"'I thought up that thing'": Saul David interview with TN.
"'I was sorta conned into it'": Millar interview with Paul Nelson, K. Millar Papers, UCI.
"'fighting a vocal public battle'": Millar to Ivan von Auw, February 20, 1964, Ober Archives, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
"'Having to include sports'": Millar to Dorothy Olding, July 21, 1964, Ober Archives, Princeton.
"'It certainly contains the germ of a book'": Millar to Olding, August 7, 1964, Ober Archives, Princeton.
"'[The editor's] original request'": Millar to Olding, August 21, 1964, Ober Archives, Princeton.
"'Archer began as a child of the genre'": Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times, July 4, 1975.
Death by water
Preface by Tom Nolan
"I can think of few more complex critical enterprises,"{" 'I can think of few more complex critical enterprises' ": Macdonald, "Down These Streets a Mean Man Must Go," Antaeus, Spring/Summer 1977; reprinted in Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly Into The Past (Capra Press, 1981).} wrote Ross Macdonald, "than disentangling the mind and life of a first-person detective story writer from the mask of his detective-narrator."
In the case of Macdonald and his protagonist Lew Archer, the enterprise would prove especially rewarding; for Ross Macdonald's fiction was tied by innumerable threads to the life of Kenneth Millar.
The author's practice of weaving fact into fiction began early — as early as this pre-Archer private-eye tale from 1945. "Death by Water" swims with references to the 29-year-old Ken Millar's past and present, as well as with hints of books and events to come{"'hints of books and events to come'": A "long, long circle" of the sort Millar savored in life, and Macdonald traced in fiction, can be drawn from the author's first private-eye story to his last p.i. novel thirty years later. Compare the death of Henry Ralston to Jacob Whitmore's in Macdonald's The Blue Hammer (Knopf, 1976): "Jacob Whitmore… wasn't drowned in fresh water… [He was] drowned in somebody's bathtub and chucked into the ocean afterwards."}.
The Valeria Pueblo, with its bungalow cottages and live orchestra, is very like hotels where Ken and Margaret Millar stayed during the war. One of the tunes its musicians play, "In a Little Spanish Town," was a hit in the late 1920s, when 12-year-old Kenneth Millar lived in Winnipeg with his aunt and uncle, a man who kept a heavy handgun in the glovebox of his Packard. That man was a lifelong touchstone for Macdonald to the world of crime — as was this romantic old tune, heard in more than one Archer novel.
Another leitmotif throughout the Archer series is the detective's finely-tuned moral sense. His young predecessor Rogers also seems capable of precise ethical judgments.
Rogers agrees for instance that a fortune gained perhaps through duplicity has nonetheless been put to good use — for, as he's told, "It kept a sick woman in comfort and brought up a fatherless boy." (Here's another link to the story's author, who grew up virtually fatherless.) Yet Rogers knows the difference between good motives and evil acts. And, like the later Archer, he's as concerned with why such acts are done as with who did them. "The trouble's all over," Rogers says once the corpse is found. "I'm just trying to understand it."