Sat 5 Jan 2019
Reviewed by Jonathan Lewis: KENNETH MILLAR – The Dark Tunnel.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[5] Comments
KENNETH MILLAR – The Dark Tunnel. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1944. Lion #46, paperback, 1950. Gregg Press, hardcover, 1980. Also published as I Die Slowly. Lion Library LL52, paperback, 1955.
Ross Macdonald penned his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, in 1944 under his birth name Kenneth Millar. A detective story where the protagonist is a professor rather than a private investigator, the book is best categorized as a work of mystery fiction with strong elements borrowed from the type of thrillers that inspired many a Hitchcock film. Although by no means a flawless work, Millar’s debut novel demonstrates the author’s fluidity with language, particularly the hardboiled vernacular that has become the trademark patois of those writers who have followed in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Published during the Second World War – and soon before Millar entered service in the U.S. Navy – The Dark Tunnel refers to a physical place detailed in one of the more action oriented portions of the novel. It likewise serves as an apt metaphor for Germany’s descent into Nazism. After all, Germany was not some backwater, uncivilized country; it was a country with a rich cultural and literary tradition that nonetheless chose a dark path.
The novel follows the path of Dr. Robert Branch, a literature professor at an unnamed Midwest university set in the fictional town of Arbana (a clear stand-in for Ann Arbor, Michigan). After Branch’s colleague, Alec Judd, informs him of a Nazi spy ring operating in Michigan, Branch is plunged into a nightmarish world of murder and subterfuge wherein he both witnesses one murder and is falsely accused of another. Millar’s academic background – he went on to receive a doctorate in literature after the Second World War – influences his prose, lending the work a frenetic Kafkaesque quality that is more refined than some of his lesser known contemporaries.
Then there’s the girl. A beautiful redheaded German actress named Ruth Esch with whom Branch had a whirlwind romance when he was in Munich in 1937, well before the United States was at war but after the Nazi jackboots had taken power. When Ruth Esch reappears in Arbana, years after being interned in a concentration camp, Branch’s past and present collide in a maelstrom of brutal political violence.
Critics may bristle someone at Millar’s treatment of the dual subjects of homosexuality and transvestitism, both of which play pivotal roles in the unraveling of the mystery and which (Plot Alert) are linked, at least implicitly, with Nazi decadence. These topics, while not overtly exploited for sensational purposes, do lend the work a pulpy, sordid feel that likely shocked some readers when the book first appeared on bookshelves. Some may feel the emphasis on the villains’ sexuality to be a distraction from what is otherwise an impressive tale of an ordinary American man thrust into a world he doesn’t fully comprehend.
More distracting for me, however, was the suspension of disbelief constantly required to accept that a professor of literature would speak in such a hardboiled manner, let alone mouth off to authority figures such as the police and the feds. Robert Branch comes across as a working class PI masquerading as a professor, a product more of the school of hard knocks than of the mandarin university system.
Millar was clearly finding his voice at this point in his career. Academia was the world he knew. So it made perfect sense for him to create a character set in the milieu he best understood. But it’s clear that inside Robert Branch, there was a cynical Lew Archer waiting to get out and make his presence to the world known.
January 5th, 2019 at 6:07 pm
Too academic by half, but a good debut novel with a touch of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler and the whole John Buchan school somewhat uncomfortably married to a Chandleresque voice.
I had a bit of trouble with the idea of a Nazi spy ring operating in Michigan though to give him credit Millar makes it as plausible as possible, and barely plausible is acceptable in most thrillers.
As for the sexual side of the villains the only real difference here is that Millar is explicit about something inferred by other writers and in many films about Nazi’s. Before they were purged Hitler’s original followers in the SA were largely homosexual as I’m sure Millar was aware, but by the the time frame of the novel homosexuals in Germany were in concentration camps including such famous early Party icons as Otto Rahn, Hitler’s favorite mythologist and cryptoarcheologist, and Hans Heinz Ewer (who ironically wrote the Horst Wessel song beloved by the Party) who died there.
Read today it is uncomfortable to see homosexuality (repressed or not) shown as a major motivation for the monstrous shadow of Nazism, but it was common practice then dating at least back to the German officer Richard Hannay impetuously decks for making a pass at him in WWI era MR. STANDFAST, and actor Peter Lorre famously had to flee Berlin for performing Hitler as gay in his nightclub act. Biased and unfair as it may be homosexuality in Europe at the time was referred to as the ‘German disease’as S&M was the ‘English disease,’and oral sex the ‘French disease,’so Millar is well within the mainstream if perhaps a bit more blatant than most writers of the period would dare. Considering his later work it isn’t surprising he would find a Freudian motivation for his villain.
Taken in perspective and looking at the history of equating so called ‘unhealthy’ sexual behavior to the Nazi’s (who were in many ways hugely prudish) Millar is well within the mainstream if a bit disappointing to us now. All those Ilsa She Wolf of the SS movies and the like came from a long tradition of viewing the Nazi’s through an alternative sexual prism.
The main interest of DARK TUNNEL is watching Millar struggling toward Lew Archer and his hard-boiled lyrical novels, and it isn’t a bad book taken on its own.
January 5th, 2019 at 9:51 pm
I remember starting this one once, put I put it down when I discovered that Lew Archer wasn’t in it, and never managed to pick it up again.
As it stands, it’s the only Millar/Macdonald book I still haven’t read. If I don’t ever get to it, Jon’s review and your comment, David, will have to do.
January 6th, 2019 at 8:06 am
I happen to be once again rereading the Ross Macdonald series of Lew Archer novels, something I’ve done before because I find his work to be very impressive. However I have to admit I will not be rereading his first four crime novels that he wrote in the forties. They have their good points but cannot compare with the later excellent Archer novels.
January 10th, 2019 at 5:52 pm
In my review on THE DARK TUNNEL you will discover that not only is a Michigan spy ring plausible it was real. There were countless arrests of Nazi sympathizers who were undermining the war effort in the Detroit area. The most notorious real life spy ring was led by a prominent Michigan socialite!
Her’s what I wrote about the facts that Millar based his spy ring on: “Detroit really was a hotbed of spies. One spy ring was led by Grace Buchanan-Dineen, a Michigan society woman known as “The Countess” who recruited everyone from auto workers to doctors to a professor at Wayne State University in gathering information related to the war effort from various universities and industries, notably the aircraft factories in Michigan. There was also Max Stephan who helped German POWs escape from Bowmanville camp near Toronto and helped them settle in Michigan. All of this has been covered in newspapers of the era, several non-fiction accounts, and even a novel featuring Pucci Lewis, a woman Air Corps pilot turned sleuth who appears in Lipstick and Lies, the first of a series of mysteries by Margit Liesche.”
Margit Liesche’s books are reviewed on this very blog, BTW.
I have a problem with anyone reducing any type of profession to its merest stereotypes. Why can’t a professor “speak in such a hardboiled manner, let alone mouth off to authority figures such as the police and the feds”? I work in medical academia and I can tell you that it is rife with rudeness, supercilious personalities, and sarcasm from both men and women, neophytes and veterans.
January 10th, 2019 at 7:51 pm
Interesting stuff about Nazi operations in wartime Michigan. Thanks, John. The Margit Liesche books are new to me, so thanks for the information abut them as well.
As for wise-ass remarks in scholarly settings, my exposure to the latter has never been in the innermost circles, but I once herd the F-word spoken in an academic gathering, loudly, and the whole room was stunned and went very quiet for what seemed a very long time.
This was back in the 60s. Obviously time changes a lot of things.