UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Ross Macdonald [Kenneth Millar], The Underground Man (1971)

            The hot Santa Ana winds are blowing down from the southern California mountains, and the highlands are on fire around Santa Teresa, Macdonald’s fictionalized version of Santa Barbara. The fire started when a lighted cigarillo was dropped by Stanley Broadhurst as he was being stabbed to death. When detective Lew Archer investigates, he soon finds one murder on top of another, literally and figuratively, a plot development that is partly telegraphed by the book’s title. Stanley Broadhurst was obsessed with finding out about the father who deserted him and Stanley’s mother when the boy was three—just about the age that Kenneth Millar (Ross Macdonald’s real name) was when his father abandoned him and his mother. Though the author is too smart to imbue his detective with such a past or passion, intergenerational dynamics are a spring for Millar’s plots, which often require Archer to delve into the past and discover what a character may have witnessed as a child, how she or he was treated by parents, and just how present the past is in everyone’s lives. Because parents have often remarried, the family lines can get complicated. Reviewing this book for the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, Ted Gioia confesses “I even had to construct a chart to help me navigate” (https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-underground-man-at-age-50).

            Julian Symons says in his history of the detective novel (Bloody Murder) that Millar “fulfilled his ambition to use the crime story as a vehicle for conveying psychological truths.” A result is that the books are less bloody than those of his contemporary crime writers and that Archer moves through them as a sympathetic interviewer of the characters rather than a main figure who stands out as one who attracts violence. Critics are divided about which is Millar’s best book, with The Galton Case (1959) and The Chill (1963) vying with The Underground Man as candidates. All of them have, in addition to the psychological intensity, a poetic sense of southern California as an Eden after the Fall.