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Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly into the Past
Essays, interviews, and introductions by the popular American mystery writer, who used the pen name Macdonald, provide a brief profile of his life and career
- GenresBiographyNonfiction
136 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
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About the author
Ross Macdonald
162 books819 followersRoss Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar. He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer.
Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his parents' native Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. When his father abandoned his family unexpectedly, Macdonald lived with his mother and various relatives, moving several times by his sixteenth year. The prominence of broken homes and domestic problems in his fiction has its roots in his youth.
In Canada, he met and married Margaret Sturm (Margaret Millar)in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970.
He began his career writing stories for pulp magazines. Millar attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Ph.D. in literature. While doing graduate study, he completed his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, in 1944. At this time, he wrote under the name John Macdonald, in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar. He then changed briefly to John Ross Macdonald before settling on Ross Macdonald, in order to avoid mixups with contemporary John D. MacDonald. After serving at sea as a naval communications officer from 1944 to 1946, he returned to Michigan, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree.
Macdonald's popular detective Lew Archer derives his name from Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, and from Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Macdonald first introduced the tough but humane private eye in the 1946 short story Find the Woman. A full-length novel, The Moving Target, followed in 1949. This novel (the first in a series of eighteen) would become the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film Harper. In the early 1950s, he returned to California, settling for some thirty years in Santa Barbara, the area where most of his books were set. The very successful Lew Archer series, including bestsellers The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty, concluded with The Blue Hammer in 1976.
Macdonald died of Alzheimer's disease in Santa Barbara, California.
Macdonald is the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries. His writing built on the pithy style of his predecessors by adding psychological depth and insights into the motivations of his characters. Macdonald's plots were complicated, and often turned on Archer's unearthing family secrets of his clients and of the criminals who victimized them. Lost or wayward sons and daughters were a theme common to many of the novels. Macdonald deftly combined the two sides of the mystery genre, the "whodunit" and the psychological thriller. Even his regular readers seldom saw a Macdonald denouement coming.
Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his parents' native Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. When his father abandoned his family unexpectedly, Macdonald lived with his mother and various relatives, moving several times by his sixteenth year. The prominence of broken homes and domestic problems in his fiction has its roots in his youth.
In Canada, he met and married Margaret Sturm (Margaret Millar)in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970.
He began his career writing stories for pulp magazines. Millar attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Ph.D. in literature. While doing graduate study, he completed his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, in 1944. At this time, he wrote under the name John Macdonald, in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar. He then changed briefly to John Ross Macdonald before settling on Ross Macdonald, in order to avoid mixups with contemporary John D. MacDonald. After serving at sea as a naval communications officer from 1944 to 1946, he returned to Michigan, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree.
Macdonald's popular detective Lew Archer derives his name from Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, and from Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Macdonald first introduced the tough but humane private eye in the 1946 short story Find the Woman. A full-length novel, The Moving Target, followed in 1949. This novel (the first in a series of eighteen) would become the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film Harper. In the early 1950s, he returned to California, settling for some thirty years in Santa Barbara, the area where most of his books were set. The very successful Lew Archer series, including bestsellers The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty, concluded with The Blue Hammer in 1976.
Macdonald died of Alzheimer's disease in Santa Barbara, California.
Macdonald is the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries. His writing built on the pithy style of his predecessors by adding psychological depth and insights into the motivations of his characters. Macdonald's plots were complicated, and often turned on Archer's unearthing family secrets of his clients and of the criminals who victimized them. Lost or wayward sons and daughters were a theme common to many of the novels. Macdonald deftly combined the two sides of the mystery genre, the "whodunit" and the psychological thriller. Even his regular readers seldom saw a Macdonald denouement coming.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 17, 2008
Placed next to "The Chandler Papers," or even the dreadful "Chandler Notebooks," as it most likely is in most collections, this slim selection of occasional pieces has a great deal more heft than either of the Chandler selections. Chandler was a fine writer, and his letters and essays very occasionally read as though there were a fine mind behind his novels, but Millar (aka MacDonald), whatever the literary merits of his novels, is a wonderful essayist, and this volume shows it in (most) every piece.
The selection is somewhat problematic, as it seems to have been intended to be more or less complete, and thus shows very little regard for the worth of individual pieces or the coherence of the volume as a whole. The excursion, smack in the middle of the book, into Millar's environmental writing is made even more puzzling when the selection then returns to Millar's brilliant reflections on the detective novel after some thirty pages. If it must be included (and it really mustn't) why not after the essays on the detective form have reached their completion? Bizarre.
The editors intended this selection to be "semi-autobiographical," and to make up for the lack of such in Macdonald/Millar's bibliography, which may help to excuse the environmental essays. The volume mirrors Millar's famously guarded privacy, as most of these pieces have to do with literature and writing and little to do with his life, but advertising this book as autobiographical is a bit ambitious. Yes there are snippets here and there, but if you want to know about the man's life, a biography (such as Tom Nolan's "Ross Macdonald: A Biography") will have to suffice.
The other problem throughout is that the editor has failed to do his job effectively. A few judicious snips here and there, and, voila, Millar has a book-length essay, one with a considerable amount to contribute to scholarship of the detective genre, and contemporary literature as a whole. Millar was suffering from advanced Alzheimer's at the time of this collection's compilation, and I suspect would have supervised or at the very least recommended such editing had he been well.
The selection is somewhat problematic, as it seems to have been intended to be more or less complete, and thus shows very little regard for the worth of individual pieces or the coherence of the volume as a whole. The excursion, smack in the middle of the book, into Millar's environmental writing is made even more puzzling when the selection then returns to Millar's brilliant reflections on the detective novel after some thirty pages. If it must be included (and it really mustn't) why not after the essays on the detective form have reached their completion? Bizarre.
The editors intended this selection to be "semi-autobiographical," and to make up for the lack of such in Macdonald/Millar's bibliography, which may help to excuse the environmental essays. The volume mirrors Millar's famously guarded privacy, as most of these pieces have to do with literature and writing and little to do with his life, but advertising this book as autobiographical is a bit ambitious. Yes there are snippets here and there, but if you want to know about the man's life, a biography (such as Tom Nolan's "Ross Macdonald: A Biography") will have to suffice.
The other problem throughout is that the editor has failed to do his job effectively. A few judicious snips here and there, and, voila, Millar has a book-length essay, one with a considerable amount to contribute to scholarship of the detective genre, and contemporary literature as a whole. Millar was suffering from advanced Alzheimer's at the time of this collection's compilation, and I suspect would have supervised or at the very least recommended such editing had he been well.
December 30, 2024
Only meant for die-hard Macdonald fans. A lot of boring literally analysis that is based on nothing but the author's fancy. If you are looking for the Lew Archer stuff, you won't find it here - these essays and speeches belong to Kenneth Millar the citizen and academic, not Ross Macdonald the mistery writer.
March 28, 2017
Being a huge Ross Macdonald fan, and with my own writing influenced by his work, I am always keen to reading anything biographical, or in this case autobiographical. This book, which I saw a reference to and then found a second-hand copy of, is a collection of essays, articles and musings on his writing by the great man himself. And there are some wonderful insights into him, and what influenced his own writing. Having read about a dozen of his Lew Archer novels so far, I can recognise the preoccupation with broken families and with the natural environment which Macdonald candidly talks about in his pieces here.
If you're a Macdonald fan, this is a must read.
If you're a Macdonald fan, this is a must read.
January 29, 2019
Good collection of 21 short pieces in the form of introductions and essays by Macdonald. Somewhat repetitive though.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews