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Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin
Reviewed by Mark Athitakis
A new biography of the singer tries to find the person behind the avatar of sex and smack

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The big baby
Reviewed by Joan Walsh
Forget "The Death of Outrage." If the right really wants to win the Culture War, it should pass out copies of "Monica's Story"
(03/12/99)

Monica's nightmare
Reviewed by Charles Taylor
There's nothing balanced or objective about Andrew Morton's book. That's why it rings so true
(03/12/99)

Starring Monica Lewinsky, as herself
Reviewed by Liesl Schillinger
She was universally reviled -- until the public got a chance to hear her speak and, now, to read her version of events
(03/12/99)

Journey to the center of a race
By Fetzer Mills, Jr.
Randall Kenan talks about the seven-year odyssey that led him from Martha's Vineyard to Alaska in search of the truth about black life in America
(02/24/99)

Writing on Air
By Geoff Edgers
David Halberstam talks about his new book, "Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made"
(02/18/99)

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THE CASE OF THE BROKENHEARTED FATHER

A troubled teenage girl. A dark night. A dead child. Investigating the real-life tragedy that haunted Ross Macdonald.

BY DAVID BOWMAN | Like so many detectives before me, I found myself searching for a man's lost daughter. My case began last year. The girl I sought was a Californian, 17 years old. She lived in Santa Barbara. One winter night, she was driving home drunk from a party and struck and killed an 11-year-old boy.

If I were the Continental Op, Dashiell Hammett's detective, the girl would be the wealthy daughter of a Manchu provincial leader now living in exile up in San Francisco. If I were Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, the girl would be the reckless daughter of an oil tycoon. If I were Robert Parker's Spenser, she'd be the daughter of a Boston gangster on vacation. If I were Andrew Vachss' Burke, the girl would be a UCLA film student forced to shoot kiddie porn while the little boy would be one of her reluctant stars. Finally, if I were Lew Archer, Ross Macdonald's gentle but edgy investigator (named after Miles Archer, Sam Spade's murdered partner in "The Maltese Falcon"), the girl would be the daughter of a Santa Teresa pharmacist who had discovered that her father was not her father, but a man being blackmailed for 17 years by the president of a shipping company because her real father is the president's brother, the captain of an oil tanker who knocked up the girl's mother when he discovered her as a young stowaway aboard his ship hiding from her boyfriend, the pharmacist, who was then a young bank robber on the lam from a foiled job where he shot and killed a teller who was the mother of the captain's wife, who in turn was mother of the little boy the girl ran down (her half-brother).

Got it? It was unlikely that the secret behind the lost daughter I was seeking would be that complicated, even though she is -- symbolically -- the same troubled girl who appears in most of Ross Macdonald's fiction. Macdonald wrote private eye novels, but transcended the ghetto of genre. Fifteen years after his death, a major biography of the writer has finally been published, "Ross Macdonald: The Life of a Mystery Writer" by Tom Nolan. We'll get to this book in a moment, but let's first consider Macdonald's novels. His major work is not populated with clichéd gangsters and hit men, but with lost daughters and sons stumbling through the psychic labyrinths of their families -- except there's no hungry Minotaur waiting in that maze. Just Dad. Sometimes Mom.

When the "Generation Gap" became a buzzword in the '60s, many readers realized that Macdonald had been chronicling the breakup of the nuclear family since the late '50s. By 1969, Macdonald was appearing on bestseller lists. The New York Times Book Review declared his the "finest detective novels ever written by an American." Two years later, in the same hallowed journal, Eudora Welty wrote a cover review praising his sentences just as if he were a real writer: "[Macdonald's] spare, controlled narration, built for action and speed, conveys ... the world through which the action moves and gives it meaning, [bringing] scene and character, however swiftly, before the eye without a blur."

Yes. He could write. Consider this throwaway description of the L.A. freeway: "An unbroken stream of headlights poured toward us from Los Angeles, as if the city was leaking light through a hole in its side." Ah. The city becoming Christ's body on the cross, complete with the spear wound in its ribs. Macdonald's overt personification of California in his later novels is his crowning achievement. The Golden Bear's oil spills ("Sleeping Beauty") and brush fires ("The Underground Man") reflect the psychic turbulence of its citizens' families. While Lew Archer, Macdonald's detective, is like the state's recording angel -- think Bruno Ganz in Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire." Archer is ever-present, yet distant, while paradoxically brimming with empathy. Macdonald claimed that his detective was a "deliberately narrowed version of the writing self, so narrow that when he turns sideways he almost disappears."

Archer had more substance when he premiered in "The Moving Target." He was like Philip Marlowe's kid brother. Who had time for lost daughters? Archer had to chase down all those smugglers and heroin dealers and crooks who ran professional wrestling. He barked things like "Douse the muggles, Marcie," and "Sit down, mug." He sapped and got sapped, but Archer was too complicated (i.e., yellow) to outright drill any gunsel who needed drilling. Archer was such a sap that he read Anaïs Nin and Djuna Barnes. He described things like a goddamn highbrow. Raymond Chandler himself once complained that Archer said a car was pretentiously "acned with rust," instead of just "spotted." A private eye with literary ambitions just couldn't get a break back then.

Then in 1956, a seismographic change (psychologically speaking) happened to Macdonald in the middle of writing his seventh Archer novel, "The Doomsters." His next novel, "The Galton Case" (1959), was the manifestation of this transformation. The New York Times' 1983 obituary of Macdonald explains: "In the late 1950s, Mr. Macdonald suffered a personal crisis and underwent [Freudian] psychotherapy. He said the experience enabled him to come to terms with his emotionally calamitous childhood." What Macdonald came to terms with was his own lost father: In 1918, when Macdonald was 3, his sailor dad abandoned wife and child in Canada. Macdonald's mother almost sent him to an orphanage, but an aunt took the boy in. Then the aunt died when Macdonald was 12, and he bounced from boarding school to relatives to Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate and Vocational School.

When Macdonald began dealing with this material it changed the way he wrote forever. But what was this crisis that drove him into the arms of Freud? The Macdonald entry in Matthew Bruccoli's "HBJ Album Biography," a 1984 reference manual, gave me a clue. On Page 54, I learned that in 1956 Macdonald's daughter Linda was involved in a vehicular homicide. Page 72 told me that in 1959 she went missing for two weeks, but was finally found in Reno, Nev.

N E X T+P A G E+| A story straight out of the Lost Daughter novels