Yet the American regularly printed good mystery stories, and von Auw thought he could sell them something by Ken. Millar gave it a try. The result was "The Bearded Lady," a novelette narrated by Sam Drake, the lead character from Trouble Follows Me. When it was bought, Millar was as discouraged as he was grateful. If he could so easily meet the American's calculating standards, maybe he was in real danger of becoming a hack.
Between The Three Roads and "The Bearded Lady," Millar wrote a novel-length work of mainstream fiction, Winter Solstice, which he judged unsuccessful and shelved without showing to a publisher. His next attempted book was The Snatch, a private-eye novel whose protagonist, Lew Archer, was essentially the same character as Joe Rogers, the southern California detective in the pair of Shipley Bay short stories written three years earlier.
Alfred Knopf balked at accepting The Snatch, claiming it inferior to the two Kenneth Millar novels his firm had printed. But when Millar instructed his agent to submit the manuscript elsewhere under the pseudonym "John Macdonald," Knopf reversed himself and published this "Macdonald" book in 1949 as The Moving Target.
A complaint by another writer, John D. MacDonald, caused Millar to change his new pseudonym to "John Ross Macdonald" for his next six books, including the second Lew Archer noveclass="underline" 1950's The Drowning Pool. (Not until 1956 would he be known simply as "Ross Macdonald.")
Macdonald's first books earned strongly positive reviews from mystery-fiction critics (notably Anthony Boucher). Lew Archer was well-launched as a series character by 1950, year of the sixth annual Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine short-story contest. Millar/Macdonald wrote a long entry for this competition, "Strangers in Town" — the first Lew Archer short story per se. But (as with "Death by Water"), he soon saw the story's possibilities as a novel; he had it withdrawn from submission. "Strangers in Town" would provide the skeleton for the fourth Lew Archer novel, The Ivory Grin (written in 1951, published in 1952). (Millar also used elements of "Strangers in Town" in his 1953 story "The Imaginary Blonde," collected as "Gone Girl.")
Ken Millar next wrote short crime fiction for Manhunt, a digest-sized magazine that debuted in January 1953. No women's-magazine sensibility to worry about here; Manhunt aspired to revive the hard-boiled tradition of classic pulps such as Black Mask, while riding the coattails of Mickey Spillane's phenomenal popularity. Spillane was in the first issue of Manhunt — as was Kenneth Millar, with "Shock Treatment": that third story written (in four hours) aboard ship for the 1945 EQMM contest.
Macdonald published four new Lew Archer novelettes in Manhunt in the next twelve months. The rates were good, and the editors were eager.
And in 1953 he also wrote an Archer story for that year's Ellery Queen contest. Margaret Millar entered the EQMM event too — her first "official" try at the competition, since her 1945 entry was never publicly acknowledged. John Ross Macdonald's "Wild Goose Chase" won a third prize in this ninth annual EQMM event — while Margaret Millar's "The Couple Next Door" won a second prize.
In 1954, all Macdonald's published private-eye stories were gathered between soft covers by his paperback house, Bantam Books. "I thought up that thing and got it going," editor Saul David recalled. "I was always looking for ways with pet writers — and he was one of the people I really liked a lot — to get them extra money. One of the ways was to do anthologies, ’cause they had all written short stories — novellas and things. The audience never really loved that kind of thing — they wanted novels by and large — but if the writer was popular enough, you could in effect get away with it."
Joe Rogers and Sam Drake both became Lew Archer for this collection, which could then legitimately be titled The Name Is Archer. Millar rewrote all seven stories at least slightly. He took the romantic bits out of "The Bearded Lady" and put in a fist fight. In the Manhunt novelettes, he removed some of the more violent details.
The Name Is Archer was a surprise hit — a surprise to Millar, anyway — and maybe that caused its author to take ballpoint in hand and do another Archer novelette, "The Angry Man." This time apparently the story's potential as a novel was so obvious Millar didn't bother to have his handwritten pages typed. "The Angry Man" stayed in one of his spiral-bound plot notebooks for future reference. In time it became the basis of the 1958 Archer novel The Doomsters.
Once that novel was written (but before it was published), the story underwent still more permutations. Having sold two previous books to Cosmopolitan magazine for condensation, Millar did an abridged version of The Doomsters on spec for Cosmo. When it was rejected (partly because the magazine's editors found the idea of a female killer distasteful), Millar rewrote his abridgment, changing the villain to a male. This draft was also turned down by Cosmo; it sold, though, to EQMM, where eventually it was printed in 1962 as "Bring the Killer to Justice."
A new crime-fiction journal launched in 1960 prompted the writing of the penultimate Lew Archer short story.
The digest was Ed McBain's Mystery Magazine. Millar was in the middle of writing the ninth Lew Archer novel, The Wycherly Woman, when this publication asked for an Archer novelette.
"I was sorta conned into it, in a way," Millar remembered later to journalist Paul Nelson. "An editor wanted me to do it, and I said I wouldn't but that I would give it thought or something. He came back saying, my name was on the cover and I had to write it. You know, it's an old trick… That's what got the story written: I thought I had to."
The writer took five days off from his novel to pen a story, "Midnight Blue," then went right back to work on the book. "It's the sort of thing you shouldn't do," he told Nelson. "That isn't the way to produce good ones." But he conceded of "Midnight Blue": "Actually, it's not the worst of the stories."
The final Archer short story written and published, "The Sleeping Dog," was commissioned by a more unlikely periodicaclass="underline" Sports Illustrated.
In February 1964, a senior editor from that magazine contacted Millar and proposed Ross Macdonald do a 4,000- to 6,000-word Lew Archer story with a sports background of some sort. The editor, who was a great fan of Macdonald's work, said the sports hook could be slight. Millar was eager to try, though (again) he was in the middle of polishing a new book (The Serpent's Tooth, published as The Far Side of the Dollar), and very involved, as he told Ivan von Auw, as a Santa Barbara conservationist, "fighting a vocal public battle on behalf of the Calif. Condors, of which some sixty remain, and which are menaced by Forest Service policies."
He told the Sports Illustrated man about his fight to save the condors, too; and the editor had another idea: why didn't Macdonald write a quick nonfiction piece about that for SI as well?
Millar did, and the article ran in April. Once paid for the article, Millar started work on the short story. "Having to include sports is rather a nuisance," he admitted to von Auw's partner Dorothy Olding, "but I think I'll lick it okay."