Happy Birthday, Ross ... er, Ken

Having already written extensively about novelist Ross Macdonald (the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar), who was born on this date in 1915, I’m not sure how much more I can add, without additional research and rumination. So, instead, let me simply quote something that the creator of private eye Lew Archer said of his strong but sensitive protagonist in “The Writer as Detective Hero,” one of his essays collected in Self-Portrait: Ceaslessly Into the Past (1981):

Archer is a hero who sometimes verges on being an anti-hero. While he is a man of action, his actions are largely directed to putting together the stories of other people’s lives and discovering their significance. He is less a doer than a questioner, a consciousness in which the meanings of other lives emerge. This gradually developed conception of the detective hero as the mind of the novel is not wholly new, but it is probably my main contribution to this special branch of fiction. Some such refinement of the conception of the detective hero was needed to bring this kind of novel closer to the purpose and range of the mainstream novel.

It may be that internal realism, a quality of mind, is one of the most convincing attributes a character can have. Policemen and lawyers have surprised me with the opinion that Archer is quite true to life. The two best private detectives I personally know resemble him in their internal qualities: their intelligent humanness, an interest in other people transcending their interest in themselves, and a toughness of mind which enables them to face human weaknesses, including their own, with open eyes. Both of them dearly love to tell a story.

Today would have been Macdonald’s 91st birthday. He died in 1983.