![]() He began to teach and, inspired by his wife’s success as a writer (yes, she was that Margaret Millar), he began to write, tentatively at first. He returned to Canada, married Margaret Sturm, and acquired advanced degrees and a Phi Beta Kappa key at the University of Michigan. ![]() He attended boarding schools, and in 1938, he took a break from his studies at the University of Western Ontario to travel for a year in Europe, including a visit to Nazi Germany. This rootlessness, and the hole left by an absent parent, was to become a recurring motif in Millar’s fiction. “I counted the number of rooms I had lived in during my first sixteen years, and got a total of fifty,” he has written. ![]() Kenneth Millar, under the pen name of Ross Macdonald, arguably forms the third point of what is now considered the Holy Trinity of hardboiled detective fiction, the other points being, of course, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and is, to many, the most critically and academically respected of the three.Īlthough born in Los Gatos, California, December 13th, 1915, he was raised and educated in Canada by his mother, a never particularly healthy woman, and a succession of relatives, after she and his father, a sometime sailor/poet/writer, separated. He reminded the rest of us of what was possible in our genre.” ![]() “No once since Macdonald has written with such poetic inevitability about people, their secret cares, their emotional scars, their sadness, cowardice, and courage. ![]()
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