Authors: Ross Macdonald
Dark Tunnel
Ross Macdonald (Originally published under the name Kenneth Millar)
With a new introduction by Bill Pronzini
Introduction
P
RIOR TO THE PUBLICATION
of the first Lew Archer novel,
The Moving Target,
in 1949, Kenneth Millar (Ross Macdonald) published four excellent if not highly successful suspense novels under his own name.
The Dark Tunnel
was the first of these (the others, in succession, were
Trouble Follows Me
[1946],
Blue City
[1947], and
The Three Roads
[1948]). It was written when Millar was 28-years-old, while he pursued a doctorate in English at the University of Michigan, and it was initially published by Dodd, Mead & Company in 1944, as part of their Red Badge mystery line.
Neither
The Dark Tunnel
nor any of the other three early novels involves the exploits of a Chandleresque (or, more properly, Macdonaldesque) private investigator, although their style may be termed hard-boiled and is in the same general vein as the later work featuring Lew Archer. Both
The Dark Tunnel
and
Trouble Follows Me,
in fact, are novels of homefront espionage during World War II: the plot of each, like a great many suspense stories of the period, is concerned with the activities of Nazi spies and saboteurs in the United States and Canada. Each also deals with other matters, including relevant social and psychological issues; even in the embryonic stages of his career, Millar/Macdonald was much too accomplished a writer to limit his material to a single melodramatic focus.
When
The Dark Tunnel
first appeared it was hailed by many critics as the debut of an important new novelist in the suspense field. The
Boston Globe
called it “breath-taking,” the
New Republic
said it was “a humdinger,” the
New York Times
described it as “a thrilling story told with consummate skill.” Book reviewers are prone to overuse—and misuse—such superlatives, but in this case the praise is justified. Few first novels of any type are as polished, professional, and powerful as this one.
Those readers familiar with Millar/Macdonald’s writing only through the chronicles of Lew Archer will perhaps be surprised by
The Dark Tunnel.
The Archer novels, although rapidly paced, are crafted as the measured unraveling of events through dialogue, psychological insight, and detective work, while the emphasis here is on fast and furious action. The first few chapters may seem to belie this claim, and may strike the reader as vintage Macdonald in their handling, but these chapters are meant to be momentum-builders: they start the novel rolling. When it gathers sufficient momentum it begins to hurtle toward its climax without slowing up; indeed, it continues to pick up speed as it plunges ahead. Anyone who enjoy what publishers of today like to call “page-turners” will be more than satisfied for this reason alone.
Other qualities for which Ross Macdonald has been widely praised—sensitive characterization, wry humor, superior dialogue—are all in evidence here. The style, as noted above, is hard-boiled in that it utilizes the kind of detached realism that Joseph T. Shaw pioneered in the pages of
Black Mask
and that Chandler and Hammett refined and made famous. But Millar/Macdonald also refined it in his own way, beginning with this first novel, by adding elements of the literary, the scholarly, the lyrical. This unique admixture, as any aficionado of Lew Archer knows, includes a liberal seasoning of similes and metaphors; those in
The Dark Tunnel
are often as evocative and inventive as the ones which appear in later works. For example:
The stars fell down and rattled at the bottom of the sky and the night put on shabby brown clothes.
Then came a company of goose-stepping soldiers in army uniform, kicking out stiffly in unison as if they were all angry at the same thing and to the same degree. I had a grotesque vision of radio-controlled robots in field grey, marching across a battlefield toward smoking guns on pointed toes like ballet dancers and bleeding black oil when they fell down dead.
… the darkness swelled and contracted around me like black blood in an artery.
Wild ideas rushed through my mind like leering mimics of truth.
Now I could see only the dim outlines of the room, the walls which seemed more distant than before, the pale ridge my legs made under the sheet, the dark roses beside the window. I lay and watched the black mass of the roses, red in the sun and black at night like blood, rich and delicate to the touch like a loved woman, drowsy and dark like sleep and death.
The novel’s central premise is simple enough and can be summarized in a paragraph. Alec Judd, head of the War Board at “Midwestern University” in Arbana, confides in his friend, Dr. Robert Branch (the narrator), an English professor, that he suspects one of the Board members of being a Nazi spy. The man he suspects is Dr. Herman Schneider, head of the school’s German Department for the past several years, who ostensibly fled the Hitler regime in 1935. Schneider’s son, Peter, also comes under suspicion; as does Ruth Von Esch, an actress whom Branch met and fell in love with during a trip to Germany in 1937, and who comes to Arbana after a mysterious six-year disappearance. An alleged suicide, two attempts on his own life, and a savage murder for which he is framed plunge Branch into a series of nightmarish chases that lead from Arbana to Detroit and finally to a harrowing climax in a remote section of Canada.
This capsule plot summary, however, does little justice to what is a novel of ambition and complexity. And only hints at its virtues, which also include a pair of ingenious murder methods, one of which succeeds and one of which doesn’t; a well-portrayed academic background enhanced by a variety of erudite references; and, most important, an expert blending of disparate thematic material.
In the Lew Archer series, one of Macdonald’s obsessive themes is the loss of something or someone in an individual’s past and his quest to recapture it or its meaning—what Macdonald, in his chapbook
On Crime Writing
(1973), refers to as “exile and half-recovery and partial return.” Branch’s relationship with Ruth Von Esch is just such a case. Social and psychological issues also play major roles; one of these, in fact, encompasses the novel’s primary plot twist. To mention it here would be to give away the twist and spoil some of the considerable suspense; suffice it to say that it was shocking for its time and no doubt caused a stir in certain circles. (
The Dark Tunnel
’s first paperback publisher, the long-extinct Lion Books, was not nearly so circumspect when they reprinted it in 1950. Their first edition’s cover blurbs revealed the surprise ending with sensationalistic relish, in an obvious effort to entice newsstand book buyers. Those readers who bought it expecting lurid sensationalism had to have been disappointed; its treatment of controversial subject matter is, for the most part, restrained.)
The oppression and brutality of the Nazi war machine is the main focus of
The Dark Tunnel.
And yet the book is not prowar, as many novels with similar themes were during the early 1940s; rather, the statement it makes is an unusual and subtle blend of patriotism and pacifism. Millar advocates the defeat of the Axis powers not so much because they pose a threat to democracy or any other political ideology, as because fascism (or any other extremism) is a dangerous social disease, a form of madness that threatens the survival and well-being of the world’s population. There is no flag-waving or inflammatory propaganda in these pages, no careless racial slurs, no talk of annihilating Germany or Japan or any other nation of the interest of an ongoing peace. Millar’s concern is people, not politics; an emergence from the dark tunnel of war, where melodrama is the norm and insanity runs rampant, into the light of reason and compassion. The flashback scenes which take place in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s are particularly effective in the dramatization of these thematic views.
In
On Crime Writing
Macdonald says, “Detective story writers are often asked why we devote our talents to working in a mere popular convention. One answer is that there may be more to our use of convention than meets the eye … The literary detective has provided writers since Poe with a disguise, a kind of welder’s mask enabling us to handle dangerously hot material.” He was, of course, talking about Lew Archer and the Archer series. But he might also have been referring to this and his other early novels.
Like all of Macdonald’s work,
The Dark Tunnel
is a novel of insight, ambition and social commentary disguised as pure entertainment. The fact that it succeeds on this level as well as on that of spy thriller and suspense novel—and the concomitant fact that 36 years after its publication it can be read and appreciated as much more than a literary and/or historical curiosity—is a tribute to the talent and vision of Kenneth Millar and his alter ego, Ross Macdonald.
Bill Pronzini
San Francisco, California
D
ETROIT IS USUALLY HOT
and sticky in the summer, and in the winter the snow in the streets is like a dirty, worn-out blanket. Like most other big cities it is best in the fall, when there is still some summer mellowness in the air and the bleak winds have not yet started blowing down the long, wide streets. The heart of the city was clean and sunlit on the September afternoon that Alec Judd and I drove over from Arbana. The skyscrapers stood together against the powder-blue sky with a certain grotesque dignity, like a herd of frozen dinosaurs waiting for a thaw.
Alec drove his car into a parking-lot off Jefferson and we got out and headed for the Book Tower Building. His legs were not long for his height, a couple of inches less than my six feet, but his long, aggressive stride compensated for the length of his legs and I had to stretch mine to keep up with him. At thirty-nine he was so fit that years of deskwork had failed to bow his shoulders.
“Well, here we go,” he said. “Wish me luck.”
“Like hell I will. You know what I think of your going in the Navy. Anyway, I’m the one that needs the luck.”
“You don’t have to worry, they’ll take you.”
“Maybe,” I said. “The Army turned me down last year.”
“That was last year. They’ve given up using Superman as a standard.”
“Perhaps the Army has. The Navy’s still pretty fussy, I hear. They want only men with hawk eyes who were born with a caul and can’t drown.”
“Where does that leave me?” Alec said. “You’ve got ten years on me.”
“They’ll snap you up in a hurry, and you know it. They’ve been casting yearning glances at you ever since Pearl Harbor.”