In 1976 Kenneth Millar, aka Ross Macdonald, gifted a young aspiring writer with an inscribed copy of Sleeping Beauty: “For Linwood, who will, I hope, someday outwrite me.” More than two decades later, Barclay recalls the mentor who first opened the doors to his writing life.
The letters I get from young people, ranging in age from 15 up, are the ones that, for some reason, mean most to me,” Ross Macdonald wrote a friend in 1971, when his success as a bestselling detective-fiction novelist was gaining him new correspondents from all over the world, “and the ones I answer first.”
One such correspondent was Linwood Barclay, of Ontario, Canada. Barclay—now 49, and author of the first mystery Bad Move (Bantam)—initially wrote Macdonald in Santa Barbara, California, in 1975, when he was 20.
Like Macdonald (whose real name was Kenneth Millar), Barclay was born in the United States (in New Haven, Connecticut) and raised mostly in southern Ontario, the son of a commercial artist who specialized in drawing automobiles for ads in such magazines as Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post.
“With the kind of work that my dad was in, he was not unlike a blacksmith,” Barclay said recently. “He was one of the very best at something that nobody wanted anymore: all the car ads were going completely to photography.” Barclay’s parents bought a summer resort in Ontario’s “cottage country” to run as a business in 1966. Linwood was 16 when his father died, and the teenager continued to help his mother run the camp.
By then, he’d become hooked on mystery and other genre fiction. “I started reading all Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels; I was buying those like crazy,” he recalled. “And I was reading Ray Bradbury, and the Star Trek novelizations. Also every Agatha Christie book I could get my hands on. And then, probably around the time I was starting high school, I picked up at our grocery store in Bobcaygeon a paperback copy of The Goodbye Look, which I was attracted to by the cover blurb, which said: ‘the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American’—the William Goldman line. And I loved it; I loved the Lew Archer books, because there was always this extra stuff going on: this added dimension of character history and screwed-up families, which I found fascinating.”
Young Barclay read all the Macdonald books he could find. “By the time I got to university,” he said, “I was so interested in detective fiction that I pitched to my English professor the idea of doing a thesis on the history of the detective in fiction, starting with Poe and moving through Sam Spade and so forth. I saw that as an excuse to write to my favorite writer: Kenneth Millar. And he wrote back, to my astonishment.”
Barclay then found the courage to ask if Millar/Macdonald would read the manuscript of a short mystery novel he’d written. “That was, I realize, a huge imposition. And he wrote back and said, ‘Sure.’ I mean, he was wonderfully generous with his time and encouragement.”
Millar told his correspondent the manuscript was nearly good enough to be published, and made suggestions on how to improve it. He mentioned Barclay with enthusiasm to journalists who came to interview him in Santa Barbara. And when Kenneth and his wife and fellow author Margaret Millar made a family trip to Ontario in May of 1976, Ken contacted Linwood and invited him to dinner.
“Typically, in Canada, the thrill would be to meet a hockey star,” Barclay said. “I couldn’t care less about that; but this, to me, was like spending several hours with Wayne Gretzky would be to someone else; I was so excited. I joined them for dinner; and then I took Kenneth Millar in my car and gave him a tour all around my university (Trent); we walked him about. And it’s still probably the most amazing night of my life.” Millar inscribed Barclay’s copy of Macdonald’s novel Sleeping Beauty: “For Linwood, who will, I hope, someday outwrite me.”
His dream, at age 20, Barclay remembered, was to write a series of detective novels with a recurring character, a la Macdonald’s Lew Archer books. But real life intervened.
“I wanted to get a job where I could get paid money to write,” he said, “and the most obvious avenue seemed to be newspapers.” At 22, within two weeks of getting married, Linwood went to work for two years as a reporter at the Peterborough Examiner in Ontario: “Where I wrote about such things as the birth of triplet calves, and (brucellosis), which is a disease that cows get. I wrote so many stories about (brucellosis), I was almost sure I had it.”
As a novice newspaperman, Barclay was still reading crime fiction almost exclusively, and still trying to write it. But there was little time for novel manuscripts once he took the first of several editorial positions at the Toronto Star, in 1981.
Then, in 1993, he got a job at the Star as a thrice-weekly columnist, writing wittily on current events and domestic travails. The column led to two family-humor books and then “a very angry, satirical book” about the premier of Ontario at the time. Linwood Barclay’s fourth Canadian-published book was Last Resort, a charming and poignant memoir of his early years.
“Finally,” in 2002, he said, with his son and daughter all but grown, “I got back to the kind of thing I always wanted to write in the first place.”
He was inspired by his wife’s habit of leaving her purse unattended in grocery-store shopping carts. “Instead of doing some kind of nuclear-terrorist kind of book, I look at ordinary things,” he said, “and then extrapolate from that. I was in the store one day when Neetha left her purse in the cart, and I thought, ‘You know, I should just take this purse and walk off with it, and let her panic; and that would teach her a lesson.’ Which I did not do. But I thought: ‘What if I was the kind of guy who would do that? What if a smartass, know-it-all, anal-retentive guy did this—and it went horribly wrong?’”
Barclay wrote three chapters of his story, then sought professional assistance.
“I called a very, very prominent agent in Canada, who does very well selling all over the world,” he said. “I caught her on the phone and said who I was; she was incredibly unimpressed. And I said to her, ‘I’m writing a comic thriller.’ And she said: ‘Oh.’ She said, ‘Comic thrillers are very hard to do. A straight thriller—that’s one thing; but trying to pull off a funny thriller is really really difficult.’ But she said, ‘If you want, you can send me the first chapter by email.’ So I sent her the first chapter. She phoned me the next day and said, ‘Do you have a second chapter?’ I sent her the second chapter. She wrote back and said, ‘I love this; how much of this do you have done? And I have to know if you have a handle on this, and know where this is going, and if it works.’ She said, ‘Sit down, do a whole plot outline, figure the whole thing out.’ So I took a week and wrote a synopsis; she read that and said, ‘That’s great; finish it.’ She had the finished, revised version of the book in her hand by January of last year; and by April, she’d sold it to Bantam.”
Twenty-eight years after having met Kenneth Millar, Linwood Barclay would see his first novel published (in hardcover) by Ross Macdonald’s longtime US paperback house.
“And it wasn’t just Macdonald,” Barclay said. “The Rex Stout books, the Star Trek books, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone books—just about every book that I bought as a teenager was published by Bantam.”
Linwood Barclay’s own Bantam book, Bad Move, is a sort of edgy cozy: an amusing but suspenseful tale of a man who moves his family to the suburbs to escape city dangers, only to find that the ‘burbs hold their own perils. A literary scholar like Kenneth Millar would no doubt trace this story’s antecedents back to Stephen Leacock, the brilliant Canadian author who was the grandfather of North American humor writing.
“I think it’s a funny thriller,” said Barclay, “that’s grounded in the real world. It’s not a murder- in-the-library, country-club kind of murder mystery; it’s rooted in a very real, everyday existence of working families and parent-teacher meetings—that kind of hectic life that we all are living. In those everyday environments, we have ugly things that happen; and yet, in that sort of chaos, there’s still—I think—a lot of humor.”
Bad Move is Linwood Barclay’s first book to be published “south of the border,” as Canadians refer to the US. He’s already written its sequel for Bantam. And, though no author tour is planned, Barclay said he may go on his own to New York City, simply to see Bad Move on sale in the States. “Or maybe I’ll just drive across the border, to Buffalo.”
And what does Linwood Barclay think Ross Macdonald would say about Bad Move?
“I think that even if he didn’t like it, he would be extremely generous and find nice things to say about it, because that’s the kind of guy he was,” Barclay said. “And I think he’d be thrilled for it to have happened.”
Me too.
Linwood Barclay's book, The Accident, was published August 2011 by Bantam.
Tom Nolan is the author of Ross Macdonald: A Biography and the editor of Strangers in Town: Three Newly Discovered Mysteries by Ross Macdonald.
This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Summer Issue #85.
