F. Scott Fitzgerald’s influence on Ross Macdonald

The Moving Target — originally published in 1949 — features Lew Archer, an L.A. private investigator, who appears in a series of novels by Ross Macdonald.

While reading the work of this amazing wordsmith/poet, I was struck by its similarity to the best passages in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald — and figured somebody somewhere must have written about this. A quick Google search revealed more than I’d hoped.

My research uncovered a fascinating article entitled “Ross Macdonald’s Marked Copy of The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of Influence” by Robert F. Moss. In the article, Moss demonstrates how Macdonald learned from Fitzgerald on a variety of levels, including language, plot, structure, and technique. Macdonald is quoted as calling Fitzgerald “a dream writer,” “our finest novelist,” and “my master.” Read the entire article here.

To give a sense of Macdonald’s command of language, here is the opening paragraph from Chapter 4 of The Moving Target:

We rose into the offshore wind sweeping across the airport and climbed toward the southern break in the mountains. Santa Teresa was a colored air map on the mountains’ knees, the sailboats in the harbor white soap chips in a tub of bluing. The air was very clear. The peaks stood up so sharply that they looked like papier-maché I could poke my finger through. Then we rose past them into chillier air and saw the wilderness of mountains stretching to the fifty-mile horizon.”

Ross Macdonald’s prose as poetry

I know this is a poetic no-no (I’ve been told as such by real poets), but I just can’t help myself. Ross Macdonald‘s beautiful language makes me think of poetry, as noted below.

THE MOVING TARGET
Chapter 4 (Opening Lines)
by Ross Macdonald

We rose into the offshore wind sweeping across the airport
and climbed toward the southern break in the mountains.
Santa Teresa was a colored air map on the mountains’ knees,
the sailboats in the harbor white soap chips in a tub of bluing.
The air was very clear.The peaks stood up so sharply
that they looked like papier-maché I could poke my finger through.
Then we rose past them into chillier air and saw
the wilderness of mountains stretching to the fifty-mile horizon.

Haruki Murakami Reads Ross Macdonald

In this excerpt from The Paris Review interview with Haruki Murakami — bestselling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — the writer discusses the influence of hardboiled detective fiction on his work.

INTERVIEWER: … hard-boiled American detective fiction has clearly been a valuable resource. When were you exposed to the genre and who turned you on to it?

MURAKAMI: As a high-school student, I fell in love with crime novels. I was living in Kobe, which is a port city where many foreigners and sailors used to come and sell their paperbacks to the secondhand bookshops. I was poor, but I could buy paperbacks cheaply. I learned to read English from those books and that was so exciting.

INTERVIEWER: What was the first book you read in English?

MURAKAMI: The Name Is Archer, by Ross Macdonald. I learned a lot of things from those books. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. At the same time I also loved to read Tolstoyand Dostoevsky. Those books are also page-turners; they’re very long, but I couldn’t stop reading. So for me it’s the same thing, Dostoevsky and Raymond Chandler. Even now, my ideal for writing fiction is to put Dostoevsky and Chandler together in one book. That’s my goal.

INTERVIEWER: At what age did you first read Kafka?

MURAKAMI: When I was fifteen. I read The Castle; that was a great book. And The Trial.

INTERVIEWER: That’s interesting. Both those novels were left unfinished, which of course means that they never resolve; your novels too—particularly your more recent books, like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—often seem to resist a resolution of the kind that the reader is perhaps expecting. Could that in any way be due to Kafka’s influence?

MURAKAMI: Not solely. You’ve read Raymond Chandler, of course. His books don’t really offer conclusions. He might say, He is the killer, but it doesn’t matter to me who did it. There was a very interesting episode when Howard Hawks made a picture of The Big Sleep. Hawks couldn’t understand who killed the chauffeur, so he called Chandler and asked, and Chandler answered, I don’t care! Same for me. Conclusion means nothing at all. I don’t care who the killer is in The Brothers Karamazov.

INTERVIEWER: And yet the desire to find out who killed the chauffeur is part of what makes The Big Sleep a page-turner.

MURAKAMI: I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.

Read the rest of The Paris Review interview here.

Photo: Haruki Murakami and cat friend.

Ross Macdonald: In-Depth Detective Fiction

One of my best all-time thrift store finds was a pristine-condition Vintage/Black Lizard edition of Black Money by Ross Macdonald.

Born Kenneth Millar on December 13, 1915 in Los Gatos, California, and raised in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, Ross Macdonald has been called the heir to Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep). Most of his novels — starring detective Lew Archer — are set in Los Angeles and the fictional Santa Teresa, based on Santa Barbara, where he lived most of his life with his wife, and fellow detective novelist, Margaret Millar. Macdonald passed away in 1983 at age 67.

In Ross Macdonald, a Biography, author Tom Nolan writes: “By any standard he was remarkable. His first books, patterned on Hammett and Chandler, were at once vivid chronicles of a postwar California and elaborate retellings of Greek and other classic myths. Gradually he swapped the hard-boiled trappings for more subjective themes: personal identity, the family secret, the family scapegoat, the childhood trauma; how men and women need and battle each other, how the buried past rises like a skeleton to confront the present. He brought the tragic drama of Freud and the psychology of Sophocles to detective stories, and his prose flashed with poetic imagery.”

Here are a few lines from the opening page of Black Money: “I walked around the end of the fifty-meter pool, which was enclosed on three sides by cabanas. On the fourth side the sea gleamed through a ten-foot wire fence like a blue fish alive in a net. A few dry bathers were lying around as if the yellow eye of the sun had hypnotized them.”

Find Black Money by Ross Macdonald at Amazon.com.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Influence on Ross Macdonald

The Moving Target — originally published in 1949 — features Lew Archer, an L.A. private investigator, who appears in a series of novels by Ross Macdonald.

While reading the work of this amazing wordsmith/poet, I was struck by its similarity to the best passages in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald — and figured somebody somewhere must have written about this. A quick Google search revealed more than I’d hoped.

My research uncovered a fascinating article entitled “Ross Macdonald’s Marked Copy of The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of Influence” by Robert F. Moss. In the article, Moss demonstrates how Macdonald learned from Fitzgerald on a variety of levels, including language, plot, structure, and technique. Macdonald is quoted as calling Fitzgerald “a dream writer,” “our finest novelist,” and “my master.” Read the entire article here.

To give a sense of Macdonald’s command of language, here is the opening paragraph from Chapter 4 of The Moving Target:

We rose into the offshore wind sweeping across the airport and climbed toward the southern break in the mountains. Santa Teresa was a colored air map on the mountains’ knees, the sailboats in the harbor white soap chips in a tub of bluing. The air was very clear. The peaks stood up so sharply that they looked like papier-maché I could poke my finger through. Then we rose past them into chillier air and saw the wilderness of mountains stretching to the fifty-mile horizon.

The Moving Target was made into Harper, a 1966 movie starring Paul Newman. Legendary screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men) adapted the novel for the screen — and considered The Moving Target his breakthrough script (it was his second screenwriting credit). Newman also starred as Lew Harper (the screen name for Lew Archer) in the 1975 movie The Drowning Pool, based on Ross Macdonald’s novel of the same name.

The Moving Target, Novel by Ross Macdonald

Yesterday, I finished reading The Moving Target, a novel by Ross Macdonald. I hesitate to label this multilayered book a “detective” novel — even though that’s its ostensible genre. The book — originally published in 1949 — features Lew Archer, an L.A. private investigator, who appears in a series of novels by Ross Macdonald.

While reading the work of this amazing wordsmith/poet, I was struck by its similarity to the best passages in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald — and figured somebody somewhere must have written about this. A quick Google search revealed more than I’d hoped.

My research uncovered a fascinating article entitled “Ross Macdonald’s Marked Copy of The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of Influence” by Robert F. Moss. In the article, Moss demonstrates how Macdonald learned from Fitzgerald on a variety of levels, including language, plot, structure, and technique. Macdonald is quoted as calling Fitzgerald “a dream writer,” “our finest novelist,” and “my master.” Read the entire article here.

To give a sense of Macdonald’s command of language, here is the opening paragraph from Chapter 4 of The Moving Target:

We rose into the offshore wind sweeping across the airport and climbed toward the southern break in the mountains. Santa Teresa was a colored air map on the mountains’ knees, the sailboats in the harbor white soap chips in a tub of bluing. The air was very clear. The peaks stood up so sharply that they looked like papier-maché I could poke my finger through. Then we rose past them into chillier air and saw the wilderness of mountains stretching to the fifty-mile horizon.

While researching The Moving Target, I learned (duh!) that it was made into Harper, a 1966 movie starring Paul Newman. Legendary screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men) adapted the novel for the screen — and considered The Moving Target his breakthrough script (it was his second screenwriting credit). Sounds like a great movie — can’t believe I’ve never seen it.  Newman also starred as Lew Harper (the screen name for Lew Archer) in the 1975 movie The Drowning Pool, based on Ross Macdonald’s novel of the same name.

For more about Ross Macdonald (and in case you missed it), see our article from a few weeks ago to commemorate the anniversary of Macdonald’s birth on December 13th.

Happy Birthday, Ross Macdonald

I’m a longtime fan of crime writer extraordinaire Ross Macdonald, and was excited last week when I found a Vintage/Black Lizard edition of Black Money — a novel I’d never read — at my local Goodwill store for $1.99. I’m currently reveling in Macdonald’s amazing prose — every line, a treasure.

Born Kenneth Millar on December 13, 1915 in Los Gatos, California, and raised in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, Ross Macdonald has been called the heir to Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep). Most of his novels — starring detective Lew Archer — are set in Los Angeles and the fictional Santa Teresa, based on Santa Barbara, where he lived most of his life with his wife, and fellow detective novelist, Margaret Millar. Macdonald passed away in 1983 at age 67.

In Ross Macdonald, a Biography, author Tom Nolan writes: “By any standard he was remarkable. His first books, patterned on Hammett and Chandler, were at once vivid chronicles of a postwar California and elaborate retellings of Greek and other classic myths. Gradually he swapped the hard-boiled trappings for more subjective themes: personal identity, the family secret, the family scapegoat, the childhood trauma; how men and women need and battle each other, how the buried past rises like a skeleton to confront the present. He brought the tragic drama of Freud and the psychology of Sophocles to detective stories, and his prose flashed with poetic imagery.”

I consider it serendipity that I found a copy of Black Money just in time to celebrate what would have been Ross Macdonald’s 97th birthday — and consider myself lucky to spend this rainy December evening in L.A. reading Macdonald’s amazing prose.

Here are a few lines from the opening page: “I walked around the end of the fifty-meter pool, which was enclosed on three sides by cabanas. On the fourth side the sea gleamed through a ten-foot wire fence like a blue fish alive in a net. A few dry bathers were lying around as if the yellow eye of the sun had hypnotized them.”

Find Black Money by Ross Macdonald at Amazon.com.

Silver Birch Press Noir Erasure Poetry Anthology features over 40 poets from around the world

The soon-to-be-released Silver Birch Press Noir Erasure Poetry Anthology features poems by over 40 poets around the world who based their work on the writings of about 20 different noir authors. No surprise, I’m sure, is that by far the most popular authors were Raymond Chandler (16 poems based on his work) and Dashiell Hammett (9 poems based on his work), with Ross Macdonald coming in third (three poems based on his work). Other classic authors represented in the collection include James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich, with some current day authors (Dennis Lehane, Walter Mosely, and others) filling out the collection.

Erasure poems are created by photocopying a page from a book, then marking out, whiting out, or in other ways (see examples), eliminating some of the words. The remaining words  constitute the erasure poem.

The Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology will be released by Dec. 1, 2013.

A special thank you to contributing editors Jenni B. Baker, Catfish McDaris, james w. moore, and Gerald So for their fabulous work in bringing fellow authors into the collection and helping spread the word.

Cover: Guy Budziak, filmnoirwoodcuts.com.

Available by Dec. 1st: Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology

Available by December 1, 2013:  Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology — a collection of poems from authors around the world based on the writings of hardboiled detective novelists such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross MacDonald. A special thank you to Guy Budziak, of filmnoirwoodcuts.com, for his beautiful cover art.

Coming Soon: Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology

We’re in the final stages of editing the Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology — a collection of poems from authors around the world based on the writings of hardboiled detective novelists such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross MacDonald. A special thank you to Guy Budziak, of filmnoirwoodcuts.com, for his beautiful cover art.

The Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology will be available by December 1st. Stay tuned for updates.