He did find time for more of his new favorite writer. "The more I read of Fitzgerald, the crazier I am about him," Millar told Margaret, "especially his style — high, chaste, romantic and colloquial at once, the very essence of the ideal style and thus of course lacking a little weight and warmth — and his ability to put a bloom, a priceless loving quality, on people and their relations. His main defect is an idealizing tendency, which makes his characters a little too good to be true even when they're bad… Still, what a writer, and how much he has to teach about writing (he understood style and technique both generally and in detail better than any other U.S. writer…). It practically makes me weep to read those waltzing paragraphs: what an eye and ear and touch." Millar's re-immersion in Fitzgerald, at the age of nearly-thirty, and his first-ever reading of Tender Is the Night, seemed to have as profound an effect on him as had reading Dickens at ten, Hammett at fifteen, and Chandler at twenty-five. After writing the above to Margaret, Millar sat down the same night and re-read The Great Gatsby straight through: something he'd later do almost yearly. Then he read all the Fitzgerald short stories he could find, and asked Margaret to send him The Crack-Up.
Beside such grace, his own efforts seemed puny. Millar was self-deprecating about his recent private-eye tales: "I seriously doubt that I'll ever set the Sacramento River on fire with my mystery shorts, don't you?" But at the same time, he said, "I feel quite smugly happy about getting back to writing and liking it." And he was fond of the characters he'd created, "Air" 's Millicent Dreen and "Water" 's the Ralstons, "though both are limned with unnecessary crudity…" In fact, he thought, "Water could make a nice crappy little mystery novel, maybe, huh?"
Millar asked that Maggie add a tag line to "Water" if she found out about the inheritance aspect: "Either: It worked, John'll get it. Or: The irony of it the effort was wasted, John won't get the money anyway on account of — (I think the latter is correct but wouldn't know.)" After consulting a toxicology text, Millar sent his wife some rewritten lines to insert into a coroner's explanation of a drowning in "Death by Air."
Margaret pronounced herself thrilled with the Rogers stories: "Was utterly delighted at your dialogue & the freer flow of things. There's nothing amateur in them." She wrote a final paragraph for "Water" as instructed, made the inserts he'd requested, had the stories professionally typed and sent them to New York for submission.
Margaret too was working on a story for the contest; hearing it described, her husband said, "It sounds like the sort of thing that could cop a prize by originality and good writing…"
Stimulated by his Rogers efforts, Millar found he now had "plenty of good ideas for shorts — too many — but would hate to spend too much time unprofitably." Still he took time to write a third competition entry — not "The Tribulations of Mr. Small" but a grim murder story titled "Shock" (told completely in dialogue, and finished in four hours) which he mailed from the south Pacific directly to Ellery Queen.
With his EQMM "duties" out of the way, Millar returned to his novel. He was able to brag to Margaret in mid-November: "I am proud to report that I've added, in the last four days, 8000 words to Ride — not all of it good, by any means, but all of it wordage, and some of it good, in varying ways… Ain't it hard, though, to handle a bunch of people on a train trip?… I've fluffed it quite badly but I don't give a damn… [W]hat I want is to finish this book, my personal albatross, and never think of it again."
As he wrote, the Shipley Bay made its way to the atoll of Kwajalein and back. In addition to writing, as usual Millar read: Don Marquis' Archy and Mehitabel, Ann Arbor friend Henry Branson's latest mystery The Fearful Passage ("quietly perfect… damn good"); and Prater Violet, a brief novel about a film producer, by one of Maggie's Warners co-workers, Chris Isherwood. "As a piece of technical work," Millar said of the latter, "the book can teach me plenty: it has an easy grace and deceptive casualness that I find very enviable." But not as enviable as the traits of his latest literary hero: "A page of the letters Fitzgerald dashed off almost invariably has more meat than one of Isherwood's very carefully written pages," Millar maintained. "Compared with Fitzgerald, Isherwood doesn't seem very much alive." He went back to re-reading Margaret's gift copy to him of Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up.
Millar the writer continued to make good progress on The Long Ride. When he learned late in December he'd be discharged from the service next March 15, he wondered if that might not give him just "time enough… to run another book through the mill."
Meanwhile the current one needed last-minute research. Two days before Christmas, Millar finally managed to reach a Honolulu detective by telephone from the Navy Yard to verify Hawaiian police procedure and terminology for his book's early scenes. The Suicides (his new title for The Long Ride) was ready to be typed. A shipmate prepared the manuscript for Millar, so sick of typewriters after his Shipley Bay duty he wouldn't touch one for the rest of his life. The author fed Suicides to his buddy one chapter at a time, "so the suspense will be an incentive to go on typing in the heat."
"Having written hard and daily" for two months, Millar gave himself the holiday "to see what pops up in my mind to write next." He wanted to turn "Death by Water" into a book but couldn't make plans until hearing whether Ellery Queen had bought the short story ("doubtful, but a possibility"). One non-detective novel he considered writing was a "rustic story" based on an Ontario family whose farm he'd worked on before college: "You may sneer," he wrote Maggie, "but if I could do it right it'd be a best-seller."
While mulling his next literary move, Millar "buried" himself "(shallowly) in inconsequential reading," including the non-fiction Viking Murder Book anthology; and viewed "some of the more unlovely examples of American movie making," including Fog Island — "in which one guy is followed by another guy who is followed by another guy who is followed by another guy. You think I'm exaggerating? You're an optimist." Other shipboard movies in December included Fired Wife ("continuously embarrassing"), She Gets Her Man ("just moderately terrible"), Boom Town, White Cargo, and Iceland, with Sonja Henie doing the hula ("really embarrassing"). Of the Shipley Bay cinema, Millar cracked: "You pays no money and you gets no choice."
He also read a text Maggie had given him on how to write "Fast Detective stories" for Clayton Rawson, an editor at True Detective and Master Detective magazines, which he thought (as she did) good: "while it didn't encourage me to write Fast (D.) stories — I prefer fiction what is fiction — I… was stimulated to sit right down and do a complete outline for another spy book… a 24-hour job, fast and mysterious with romance in it even." "The Box" would take place in San Francisco, he said, or maybe Panama; and Millar hoped to submit it when written to the Saturday Evening Post. "Nope, I've got no delusions of grandeur," he assured his wife, "… I'm just going to have a try is all."
Ken Millar was anxious to make his way as a professional writer; he'd allow himself one postwar year to see if he could earn a living by his pen alone. He aspired to be an outstanding mainstream-fiction writer and felt he had the requisite talent (upon reading a book of John Steinbeck short stories, he told Margaret: "I could do as well, I believe"), but despite his wife's urging him otherwise — he intended to establish himself at first through crime fiction: a genre which, from his point of view, need not be inferior, encompassing (as he felt) such authors as Dickens, Greene, and Faulkner. (In 1946, he'd tell Ellery Queen: "I consider Hemingway's 'Short Happy Life of F. Macomber' probably the best murder story in the language… ' ")