'ZEBRA-STRIPED HEARSE' CLASSIC 1962 WORK BY ROSS MACDONALD HITS KCRW AIRWAVES.

Byline: Tom Nolan Correspondent

In the 1970s in Southern California, few literary figures loomed as large on the regional landscape as Ross Macdonald. The suspense writer, whose books about private eye Lew Archer - which included ``The Goodbye Look,'' ``The Underground Man,'' ``Black Money,'' ``The Blue Hammer'' and ``The Moving Target'' (which became the hit 1966 Paul Newman movie ``Harper'') - were widely seen not only as the best in their field but also as stunning examples of how the mystery story in the hands of a master (Poe, Faulkner, Graham Greene, Simenon) could become a ``real'' novel. Macdonald chronicled the California scene in the hard-boiled-fiction tradition; ``The Underground Man'' drew on his experience in the 1964 Coyote wildfire, for instance, while his book ``Sleeping Beauty'' recalled the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. At the same time, his works were inner-directed, exploring questions of personal identity, family scapegoats and childhood trauma.

Not only did Macdonald set a fine example as an author, he was a generous mentor to many writers whom he coached and counseled in person and by mail. Living in Santa Barbara (where his detective Lew Archer was based), Macdonald informally presided over a congenial twice-monthly writers' luncheon that drew a democratic assortment of local and visiting wordsmiths: poets, screenwriters, novelists, academics and journalists. Macdonald died in 1983, but most of his books are still in print in handsome trade-paperback editions from Vintage/Black Lizard. (Come December, Black Lizard will add two more titles to its Macdonald line.)

In the next several weeks, radio listeners can experience Ross Macdonald's fictional vision in a unique way. Beginning tonight at 7, KCRW (89.9 FM) will start airing a full-cast, unabridged, 8-1/2 hour dramatization of ``The Zebra-Striped Hearse,'' a classic 1962 Macdonald work, on its ``Evening Playhouse.'' It is KCRW's second uncut adaptation of a Macdonald book.

In 1996, the station produced Macdonald's ``Sleeping Beauty.'' Released later on cassette by Audio Partners, that show won two audio-industry awards. Like ``Sleeping Beauty,'' KCRW's ``The Zebra-Striped Hearse'' is directed by and stars Harris Yulin as a superbly understated, capable and reflective Lew Archer, supported by an all-star cast including Ed Asner, Richard Dysart, Tyne Daly, Shirley Knight and Mary Kay Place. And, like its predecessor, ``Zebra'' invites dramatic appreciation of a novelist whose achievements made him not only an admirable figure in the crime-fiction school founded by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler but earned him a place in the larger world of American letters as well. Critic Matthew Bruccoli judged the collection of Archer's books ``one of the splendid achievements in American fiction.'' Frank MacShane, Chandler's biographer, called Macdonald ``one of the best writers of his generation.'' In 1982, Ross Macdonald was named the third recipient of the Robert Kirsch Award for a distinguished body of work about the West.

Some might be startled to learn that a writer so famously identified with California spent his formative years in Canada. Macdonald, whose real name was Kenneth Millar, was born in 1915 in Los Gatos, Calif., of Canadian parents who soon separated. Millar was raised by Canadian relatives in provinces from British Columbia to Alberta to Ontario, where he earned a university degree and married the future mystery writer Margaret Millar in 1938.

After graduate work at the University of Michigan and service as an officer in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Millar moved with his wife and daughter to Santa Barbara in 1946. There, as ``Ross Macdonald,'' he began penning the 18 Lew Archer books that finally made him, in the 1960s and '70s, a best-selling American novelist.

Early Archers, written under the influence of Chandler and Hammett, were well-stocked with Hollywood starlets and L.A. racketeers. But over time, Macdonald developed his own style and themes. While Macdonald continued to document the Southern California scene (``Zebra,'' for instance, has glimpses of the surfing subculture), his books increasingly explored his own concern with and knowledge of guilty secrets and generational conflicts.

As I wrote of his works in my biography of Macdonald (published in 1999, the 50th-anniversary year of the first Archer book): ``In these stories, ordinary families became the stuff of mystery; and there was always guilt enough to go around. We recognized ourselves as characters in Ross Macdonald's novels.'' In the 10 years I researched and wrote that biography, I discovered the inventive ways in which Ken Millar worked his personal experience (first as the angry child of a broken and impoverished home, later as the parent of a sadly trouble-prone daughter) into the intricate plots of Macdonald's mysteries.

He constructed those stories so skillfully that his colleagues in the Mystery Writers of America eventually gave him their Grandmaster Award. At the same time, Macdonald perfected a precise and poetic prose that won him readers far beyond the crime-fiction genre. Ross Macdonald became a writers' writer, whose fans included all sorts of mainstream authors. Thomas Berger (``Little Big Man'') admired the ``keenness of eye and precision of ear'' of Macdonald's work; ``I have turned to it often,'' Berger wrote, ``to hear ... the justice of its voice and to be enlightened by its wisdom ...'' English playwright (now Sir) David Hare wrote Millar in the 1970s to say how much pleasure he'd gotten from the Archer books. Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky made his appreciation of Macdonald known through a Canadian diplomat. Stephen Sondheim, Joyce Carol Oates, Haruki Murakami, Elizabeth Bowen and Reynolds Price all spoke publicly of their enthusiasm for Macdonald.

Most notably, Eudora Welty (possibly the most admired living American author) celebrated Ross Macdonald's ``The Underground Man'' on the front page of The New York Times Book Review and helped make that 1971 work a runaway best seller (rare for a mystery novel then). Macdonald's success showed the way for a generation of household-name crime-fiction writers, many of whom - Robert B. Parker, Sue Grafton, James Ellroy and Jonathan Kellerman among them - have acknowledged his inspiration. Sue Grafton (like Millar, a Santa Barbara resident) in homage to Macdonald has her detective Kinsey Millhone living in ``Santa Teresa,'' the same Santa Barbara-like city Lew Archer often worked in. Kellerman's most recent best-selling novel, ``Monster,'' was ``Dedicated to the Memory of Kenneth Millar.''

Macdonald's inspiration continues, with a newer wave of authors crediting Macdonald's example. L.A. crime novelist Michael Connelly wrote last year in the online publication January Magazine, ``Ross Macdonald was simply one of the best. From a personal view, he was probably as influential to me as Chandler ... (A)bout the time I was thinking that I wanted to write for a living ... Macdonald's books showed me the possibility that crime novels could be art.''

Legal-thriller writer Richard North Patterson, also in January Magazine, called Macdonald ``the greatest American mystery novelist'' and added: ``Without meaning to, Macdonald taught me how to write'' through his ``clean sentences, complex characters, a keen use of selective detail, and a strong narrative line.'' Those qualities are abundantly present in KCRW's version of ``The Zebra-Striped Hearse.''

There are many surprises and pleasures in store for a careful reader (or listener) of the Ross Macdonald books. It's wonderful to discover how ``Sleeping Beauty'' is imaginatively pinned to the framework of the 17th-century Charles Perrault fable of the same name, or to find motifs from the poems of Coleridge woven throughout ``The Chill''; to see how ``The Way Some People Die'' is built on the Greek myth of Galatea, or to notice lines from Keats' ``Last Sonnet'' casually echoed in ``The Blue Hammer.''

But it's the human emotion and felt experience in Macdonald's books that reach and move readers most directly. Ross Macdonald wrote out of Ken Millar's memories of his own family.

``I hope my books echo (but not too plainly) the feelings which moved my kin when they were alive,'' he wished near the end of his life, ``the things they were ready to die for, money and music, paintings and each other, fear of God, and their fundamental wish to be remembered, if possible loved.''

But a fan I know expressed recently the reason Ross Macdonald continues to mean so much to many. ``Chandler, Hammett - I've read all the writers in that tradition,'' he said, ``but I always come back to him. No one else touches you in the heart like Macdonald.''

The facts

--The show: ``The Zebra-Striped Hearse.''

--What: An 8 1/2-hour dramatization of the classic 1962 Macdonald work on its ``Evening Playhouse.''

--The stars: Harris Yulin, Ed Asner, Richard Dysart, Tyne Daly, Shirley Knight and Mary Kay Place.

--Where: KCRW (89.9 FM).

--When: 7 tonight and May 28, June 4, 11 and 18. On July 3, ``The Zebra- Striped Hearse'' will be broadcast in its entirety in a day-long holiday marathon, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. (with time out for ``All Things Considered'') and concluding from 6 to 7:30 p.m.

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