Received this in today's emails. Victoria
American Public MediaThe Writer's Almanac for Monday,
December 13, 2004
It's the birthday of mystery novelist Ross Macdonald,born
Kenneth Millar in Los Gatos, California (1915). He also
published under the names John Macdonald and John Ross
Macdonald. He is most known for a series of novels starring
Lew Archer, a private investigator. Macdonald named his
character after Sam Spade's dead partner in Dashiell
Hammett's The Maltese Falcon
(1930).
Macdonald spent most of his early life in Canada, where his
father worked for a time as a harbor pilot. His parents
separated when he was three. His mother suffered from typhoid
fever and couldn't support the both of them, so he moved in
with many different relatives during his childhood. He wrote,
"I counted the number of rooms I had lived in during my first
sixteen years, and got a total of fifty."
He read a lot growing up, even climbing the fire escape of
the town library at night so that he could read the authors
who were off limits to young people during the day.
Macdonald published his first story in 1931 in his high
school newspaper, and he said it was a parody of Sherlock
Holmes. He graduated from high school in 1932 and worked for
room and board as a farm laborer for a year before going to
college.
His wife, Margaret Millar, also wrote mystery novels, and was
the first of the two of them to make any money from their
writing. Her first book was The Invisible Worm (1941), and
the money they made from that allowed Macdonald to quit his
job teaching high school and attend the University of
Michigan.
He wrote, "Never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse
than your own."
Macdonald served as president of The Mystery Writers of
America organization in 1965. In his later years, he spent
three or four hours a day writing. He used spiral-bound
notebooks, filling about three pages a day while sitting in
the same bedroom chair where he wrote all of his books for
three decades. He worked on several books at once, sometimes
getting ideas for his plots by sitting in on local criminal
trials.
Macdonald spent his free time bird watching with his wife. He
was a very private man, but also a dedicated conservationist.
He sometimes came out of hiding to take part in protests for
preserving the environment. He and his wife were particularly
active in the efforts to save the California condor from
extinction.
His later novels include The Underground Man (1971) and
Sleeping Beauty
(1973) and both have environmentalist themes.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 13 Dec 2004 EST