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Herron writes. “He could have refused, with legitimate artistic and personal reasons. He could have made some feeble attempt at building suspense—like what you read near the beginnings of most crime novels. Instead, he created the first chapter you read in the novel. Read that chapter, and try to remain relaxed when you learn Hoke is being sent in without I.D., without his gun, with no backup. It is the ultimate peril Willeford ever set before his hero.”
    Luckily, that last Hoke Moseley and the other three books in the series, plus “Pick-up” and “The Burnt Orange Heresy” and “The Shark-Infested Custard” are all still in print in paperback editions. Treat the young noir fans in your circle to copies, and let them have the pleasure of discovering an American original. You might also take the opportunity to renew your own acquaintance.
    ROSS MACDONALD: A Biography, by Tom Nolan (Scribner)
    History has a way of biting us in the backside. When he died in 1959, Raymond Chandler was in eclipse, and one of the main contenders to take over his crown was Ken Millar, who wrote as Ross Macdonald. Millar had a long, good ride, especially after a claque of New York reviewers conspired to boost his fortune, but his own success seems to have peaked a few years after his death in 1983—just about the time a new wave of Chandler enthusiasm broke. Now, Chandler’s much slimmer output (seven novels) appears to be outselling even the most popular of Macdonald’s 20-plus books (“Black Money,” “The Chill,” “The Wycherly Woman”) by about 2-1, if figures posted by on-line booksellers are correct.
    Maybe this radiant, resonant and ultimately heart-breaking book by Tom Nolan (the first full-length biography of Macdonald) will help shift the balance back to where many of us think it belongs—away from the mean-spirited Chandler, the pseudo-Englishman who always seemed to be slumming when he went down those mean streets, and toward the gentler, wiser, more compassionate and basically more talented Macdonald.
    Here is just some of what Nolan has managed to do in the model biography he worked on for more than 10 years:
    - Capture the essence of a remarkable man as his life moved from a bleak, tormented childhood in the wilds of Canada, through an uncertain love-hate relationship with the world of academia, and then to early struggles, growing success and family tragedy on the golden shores of California.
    - Describe one of the most unusual literary marriages in recent memory, a working relationship so carefully protected and circumscribed that it probably did irrevocable damage to the only child to come from it.
    - Enliven the usually dreary details of a writer’s financial life with shafts of brilliant insight, especially into the strange relationship between Macdonald and his lifelong publisher, Alfred Knopf, aptly described by Macdonald’s wife, Margaret Millar, as “ ‘a troubled and a troubling man.’ ”
    - Show (for perhaps the first time) how and why the murder mystery became a worthy medium for some of the world’s smartest people who read and write in the form, and why Macdonald’s work attracted the attention of writers like W.H. Auden and Eudora Welty.
    - Acknowledge an important California literary scene, in Santa Barbara, which isn’t Hollywood or San Francisco and which deserves a place in our cultural history.
    Ken Millar was born near San Francisco in 1915, but his rambling Canadian parents soon took him back across the border to Vancouver and then points east. John Macdonald Millar was a journalist and poet who had trouble making a living; his son would later write about him, “ ‘The best of his talents were wasted on bad verse… atheism, the company of masculine friends who loved him truly but stupidly…(He) was a futile Ulysses, a Jack London with more heart and less brains. His son has spent his life trying to forgive him his bad luck.’ ” The parents split when Ken was 4, and the boy