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lived with his moody, demanding mother or a succession of relatives, torn by the twin lures of street crime and his growing delight with literature.
    At Ontario’s Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate Institute in 1931, 16-year-old Ken met Margaret Sturm, 17, “the brightest girl in school.” Six years later, both having been through serious psychological events, they jumped into a stormy, oddly structured but ultimately solid marriage that linked their lives and writing careers for almost 50 years. It was Margaret who first achieved success as a mystery writer, keeping the family afloat while Ken struggled to find a voice, and it was money she earned in Hollywood while Ken was serving as a communications officer in the Navy that bought their first house in Santa Barbara—the city that would become what he later called “ ‘the objective correlative of my mental life.’ ”
    One of the many pleasures in Nolan’s book of wonders is that even someone who thought he knew all about Ross Macdonald (I was one of the early interviewers he treated so graciously) can learn many things. How and why Ken Millar became first John R. Macdonald, then Ross Macdonald, for one thing (not because Margaret had already taken the Millar name, and only partly because of the protests of Travis McGee creator John D. McDonald). Or the fact that Ken always pronounced his surname the way his Scottish ancestors had-“MILL-er”- while Margaret stuck with “mill-AR”-“the mispronunciation she’d gotten used to” while a screenwriter at Warner Bros. studio in Hollywood.
    Nolan is particularly perceptive about the books themselves, showing how Macdonald’s talent expanded almost until the end, constantly enriching the mystery form and opening the door to so many of today’s superstars.
    No thousand-word review can do justice to the depth of information and emotion in Nolan’s epic biography, which explores the full range of Ken and Margaret Millar’s life (Margaret, who died in 1994, is definitely the book’s co-star). Nolan handles the long-suppressed details of the sad life and early death of their daughter, Linda, with courage and tact, and his description of Ken’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease would bring tears, I suspect, even to the dyspeptic heart of Raymond Chandler, who wished Macdonald ill all his life.

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    History As Mystery
    It sometimes seems that every period in history has its own resident mystery series—from Robert Van Gulik’s Judge Dee series set in ancient China through Kris Nelscott’s Smokey Dalton books which begin in Chicago in 1968. The Romans have Lindsey Davis and Steven Saylor; the British can boast such period specialists as Ellis Peters and Peter Tremayne; and Japanese historical series by the likes of Laura Joh Rowland, Dale Furitani and Sujata Massey are a growing subgenre. And then of course there are the Americans, especially women, who open our eyes and hearts with every book.
    SILVER LIES, by Ann Parker (Poisoned Pen)
    Is there anything better than a smart, tough woman solving crimes while moving through a freshly-researched portion of our own history? Margaret Lawrence’s books about post-Revolutionary War Maine midwife Hannah Trevor (“Hearts and Bones,” “Blood Red Roses”) come to mind, as do Dianne Day’s stories (“Emperor Norton’s Ghost,” “Beacon Street Mourning”) of Fremont Jones, a young woman from Boston who arrives in San Francisco just before the 1905 earthquake and begins a career as a detective. Miriam Grace Monfredo, who writes a splendid series about librarian Glynis Tryon (“Through A Gold Eagle,”) which begins just before the Civil War in upstate New York, is another prime example.
    It’s no stretch at all to place Ann Parker’s Inez Stannert on this list. Like the other women in the group, she is both of her time—a handsome, obviously educated wife supporting and playing second fiddle to a flashier gambler husband in 1879 Colorado—and a link to the future.