Preface by Tom Nolan
Like all Ross Macdonald's fiction, this tale was inspired by, or incorporated details from, Ken Millar's life. One event that sparked "Strangers in Town" was a February 1950 dinner party at the Palm Springs home of movie-studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, to which the Millars were taken by Bennett Cerf (Margaret's publisher), who was staying in the nearby desert resort of La Quinta. When a medical thermometer packed in a suitcase for this trip was found reading 107°, a clue was born.
And maybe Darryl Zanuck — who made a show of having himself publicly shaved in the presence of his guests — plays a cameo role in "Strangers," cast against type as the gangster Durano, dwarfed by his baronial house and with "two days' beard on his chin, like motheaten grey plush."
Other characters receive a share of Millar's own experience, as the author finds common emotional cause with citizens superficially unlike him. Archer's African-American client, like Ken Millar, is an ex-schoolteacher. Like Millar — who grew up poor and got to college only by dint of his father's $2,000 in life insurance — the Hispanic lawyer Santana "had come up the long hard way, and remembered every step." The religious motto on the wall in Mrs. Norris’s house is straight out of Kenneth Millar's childhood.
The vignette of a teenager or young man being taught to dance by an older girl (as Lucy teaches Alex) occurs so often in Millar manuscripts and notebooks, it surely must have figured importantly in the author's past.
Another object purloined from Millar's history is the bolo knife sent from the Philippines by Alex's chief petty officer father. It's a duplicate of the souvenir Lt. j.g. Ken Millar sought in those islands in January of 1946, when he wrote his daughter Linda from the U.S.S. Shipley Bay: "I've been trying to find a good bolo knife to hang over our mantel."{" 'I've been trying to find a good bolo knife' ": Kenneth to Linda Millar, January 8, 1946, The Kenneth Millar Papers, Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries.} The next day he reported to his wife: "I went ashore… I bought a bolo knife to hang on the wall… for $1.50…"{" 'I went ashore' ": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, January 9, 1946, The Kenneth Millar Papers, Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries.}
The "Mickey" whom Durano has been sent to neutralize would be West Coast operator Mickey Cohen. The syndicate's caution "this year especially" is due to the Kefauver hearings on organized crime.
L.A. columnist's legman Morris Cramm appeared in the 1950 Archer novel The Drowning Pool. Reviewer Anthony Boucher found him delightful and urged Millar to use him again. Macdonald obliged.
Strangers in Town
"My son is in grave trouble," the woman said.
I asked her to sit down, and after a moment's hesitation she lowered her weight into the chair I placed for her. She was a large Negro woman, clothed rather tightly in a blue linen dress which she had begun to outgrow. Her bosom was rising and falling with excitement, or from the effort of climbing the flight of stairs to my office. She looked no older than forty, but the hair that showed under her blue straw hat was the color of steel wool. Perspiration furred her upper lip.
"About your son?" I sat down behind my desk, the possible kinds of trouble that a Negro boy could get into in Los Angeles running like a newsreel through my head.
"My son has been arrested on suspicion of murder." She spoke with a schoolteacher's precision. "The police have had him up all night, questioning him, trying to force a confession out of him."
"Where is he held? Lincoln Heights?"
"In Santa Teresa. We live there. I just came down on the bus to see if you could help me. There are no private detectives in Santa Teresa."
"He have a lawyer?"
"Mr. Santana. He recommended you to me, Mr. Archer."
"I see." Santana I knew by name and reputation as a leader of minority groups in Southern California. He had come up the long hard way, and remembered every step. "Well, what are the facts?"
"Before I go over them in detail, I would like to be assured that you'll take the case."
"I'd like to be assured that your son isn't guilty."
"He isn't. They have nothing against him but circumstances."
"Not many murder cases depend on witnesses, Mrs.—"
"Norris, Genevieve Norris. My son's name is Alex, after his father." The modulation of her voice suggested that Alex senior was dead. "Alex is entering his sophomore year in college," she added with pride.
"What does Santana think?"
"Mr. Santana knows that Alex is innocent. He'd have come to you himself, except that he's busy trying to have him freed. He thinks the woman may have committed suicide—"
"It was a woman, then."
"She was my boarder. I'll tell you honestly, Mr. Archer, Alex had grown fond of her. Much too fond. The woman was older than him — than he — and different. A different class of person from Alex. I was going to give her notice when she — died."
"How did she die?"
"Her throat was cut."
Mrs. Norris laid a genteel brown hand on her bosom, as if to quiet its surge. A plain gold wedding band was sunk almost out of sight in the flesh of one of her fingers. The hand came up to her lip and dashed away the moisture there. "I found her myself, last midnight. Her terrible breathing woke me. I thought maybe she was sick or — intoxicated. By the time I reached her she was dead on the floor, in her blood. Do you know how I felt, Mr. Archer?" She leaned towards me with the diffident and confiding charm of her race, her eyes deeply shadowed by the brim of her hat: "As if all the things I had dreaded for myself and Alex, when we were going from city to city during the depression, trying to find a living, in Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago. As if they'd suddenly come true, in my own house. When I saw Lucy in her blood." Her voice broke like a cello string.
"Who was Lucy?" I asked her after a pause.
"Lucy Deschamps is her name. She claimed to be a Creole from New Orleans. Alex was taken in, he's a romantic boy, but I don't know. She was common."
"Weapon?"
She looked at me blankly.
"If it might have been suicide, the weapon was there."
"Yes, of course. The weapon was there. It was a long native knife. My husband sent it from the Philippines before his ship was sunk. Mr. Norris was a chief petty officer in the Navy." Her unconscious panic was pushing her off the point, into the security and respectability of her past.
I brought her back to the point: "And where was Alex?"
"Sleeping in his room. He has a room of his own. A college student needs a room of his own. When I screamed, he came running in in his pyjamas. He let out a cry and lay down beside her. I couldn't get him up. When the policemen came, he was blood from head to foot. He said he was responsible for her death, he was really wild. They took him away." Bowed forward in her chair like a great black Rachel, she had forgotten her careful speech and her poise. Her shadowed eyes were following the image of her son into the shadows.
I rose and fetched her a drink from the water-cooler in the corner of the room. "We can drive up to Santa Teresa together," I said, "if that suits you. I want to hear more about Lucy."
She gulped the water and stood up. She was almost as tall as I was, and twice as imposing.
"Of course. You're a kind man, Mr. Archer."
I took the inland route, over Cahuenga Pass. It wasn't built for speed, but the sparseness of traffic gave me a chance to listen. As we moved north out of the valley, the heat eased off. The withered September hills were a moving backdrop to the small sad romance of Alex Norris and Lucy.
She had come to the house in a taxi about a month before, a handsome light brown woman of twenty-five or so, well-dressed and well-spoken. She preferred to stay in a private home, she said, because all but the worst hotels in Santa Teresa were closed to her. Mrs. Norris gave her the spare room, the one in the front of the house with the separate entrance, which she sometimes rented out when she could find a suitable tenant. The rent-money would help with Alex's tuition.