Dark Tunnel Read online

  The Dark Tunnel

  Ross Macdonald (Originally published under the name Kenneth Millar)

  With a new introduction by Bill Pronzini

  Contents

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  Introduction

  PRIOR TO THE PUBLICATION of the first Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target, in 1949, Kenneth Millar (Ross Macdonald) published four excellent if not highly successful suspense novels under his own name. The Dark Tunnel was the first of these (the others, in succession, were Trouble Follows Me [1946], Blue City [1947], and The Three Roads [1948]). It was written when Millar was 28-years-old, while he pursued a doctorate in English at the University of Michigan, and it was initially published by Dodd, Mead & Company in 1944, as part of their Red Badge mystery line.

  Neither The Dark Tunnel nor any of the other three early novels involves the exploits of a Chandleresque (or, more properly, Macdonaldesque) private investigator, although their style may be termed hard-boiled and is in the same general vein as the later work featuring Lew Archer. Both The Dark Tunnel and Trouble Follows Me, in fact, are novels of homefront espionage during World War II: the plot of each, like a great many suspense stories of the period, is concerned with the activities of Nazi spies and saboteurs in the United States and Canada. Each also deals with other matters, including relevant social and psychological issues; even in the embryonic stages of his career, Millar/Macdonald was much too accomplished a writer to limit his material to a single melodramatic focus.

  When The Dark Tunnel first appeared it was hailed by many critics as the debut of an important new novelist in the suspense field. The Boston Globe called it “breath-taking,” the New Republic said it was “a humdinger,” the New York Times described it as “a thrilling story told with consummate skill.” Book reviewers are prone to overuse—and misuse—such superlatives, but in this case the praise is justified. Few first novels of any type are as polished, professional, and powerful as this one.

  Those readers familiar with Millar/Macdonald’s writing only through the chronicles of Lew Archer will perhaps be surprised by The Dark Tunnel. The Archer novels, although rapidly paced, are crafted as the measured unraveling of events through dialogue, psychological insight, and detective work, while the emphasis here is on fast and furious action. The first few chapters may seem to belie this claim, and may strike the reader as vintage Macdonald in their handling, but these chapters are meant to be momentum-builders: they start the novel rolling. When it gathers sufficient momentum it begins to hurtle toward its climax without slowing up; indeed, it continues to pick up speed as it plunges ahead. Anyone who enjoy what publishers of today like to call “page-turners” will be more than satisfied for this reason alone.

  Other qualities for which Ross Macdonald has been widely praised—sensitive characterization, wry humor, superior dialogue—are all in evidence here. The style, as noted above, is hard-boiled in that it utilizes the kind of detached realism that Joseph T. Shaw pioneered in the pages of Black Mask and that Chandler and Hammett refined and made famous. But Millar/Macdonald also refined it in his own way, beginning with this first novel, by adding elements of the literary, the scholarly, the lyrical. This unique admixture, as any aficionado of Lew Archer knows, includes a liberal seasoning of similes and metaphors; those in The Dark Tunnel are often as evocative and inventive as the ones which appear in later works. For example:

  The stars fell down and rattled at the bottom of the sky and the night put on shabby brown clothes.

  Then came a company of goose-stepping soldiers in army uniform, kicking out stiffly in unison as if they were all angry at the same thing and to the same degree. I had a grotesque vision of radio-controlled robots in field grey, marching across a battlefield toward smoking guns on pointed toes like ballet dancers and bleeding black oil when they fell down dead.

  … the darkness swelled and contracted around me like black blood in an artery.

  Wild ideas rushed through my mind like leering mimics of truth.

  Now I could see only the dim outlines of the room, the walls which seemed more distant than before, the pale ridge my legs made under the sheet, the dark roses beside the window. I lay and watched the black mass of the roses, red in the sun and black at night like blood, rich and delicate to the touch like a loved woman, drowsy and dark like sleep and death.

  The novel’s central premise is simple enough and can be summarized in a paragraph. Alec Judd, head of the War Board at “Midwestern University” in Arbana, confides in his friend, Dr. Robert Branch (the narrator), an English professor, that he suspects one of the Board members of being a Nazi spy. The man he suspects is Dr. Herman Schneider, head of the school’s German Department for the past several years, who ostensibly fled the Hitler regime in 1935. Schneider’s son, Peter, also comes under suspicion; as does Ruth Von Esch, an actress whom Branch met and fell in love with during a trip to Germany in 1937, and who comes to Arbana after a mysterious six-year disappearance. An alleged suicide, two attempts on his own life, and a savage murder for which he is framed plunge Branch into a series of nightmarish chases that lead from Arbana to Detroit and finally to a harrowing climax in a remote section of Canada.

  This capsule plot summary, however, does little justice to what is a novel of ambition and complexity. And only hints at its virtues, which also include a pair of ingenious murder methods, one of which succeeds and one of which doesn’t; a well-portrayed academic background enhanced by a variety of erudite references; and, most important, an expert blending of disparate thematic material.

  In the Lew Archer series, one of Macdonald’s obsessive themes is the loss of something or someone in an individual’s past and his quest to recapture it or its meaning—what Macdonald, in his chapbook On Crime Writing (1973), refers to as “exile and half-recovery and partial return.” Branch’s relationship with Ruth Von Esch is just such a case. Social and psychological issues also play major roles; one of these, in fact, encompasses the novel’s primary plot twist. To mention it here would be to give away the twist and spoil some of the considerable suspense; suffice it to say that it was shocking for its time and no doubt caused a stir in certain circles. (The Dark Tunnel’s first paperback publisher, the long-extinct Lion Books, was not nearly so circumspect when they reprinted it in 1950. Their first edition’s cover blurbs revealed the surprise ending with sensationalistic relish, in an obvious effort to entice newsstand book buyers. Those readers who bought it expecting lurid sensationalism had to have been disappointed; its treatment of controversial subject matter is, for the most part, restrained.)

  The oppression and brutality of the Nazi war machine is the main focus of The Dark Tunnel. And yet the book is not prowar, as many novels with similar themes were during the early 1940s; rather, the statement it makes is an unusual and subtle blend of patriotism and pacifism. Millar advocates the defeat of the Axis powers not so much because they pose a threat to democracy or any other political ideology, as because fascism (or any other extremism) is a dangerous social disease, a form of madness that threatens the survival and well-being of the world’s population. There is no flag-waving or inflammatory propaganda in these pages, no careless racial slurs, no talk of annihilating Germany or Japan or any other nation of the interest of an ongoing peace. Millar’s concern is people, not politics; an emergence from the dark tunnel of war, where melodrama is the norm and insanity runs rampant, into the light of reason and
compassion. The flashback scenes which take place in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s are particularly effective in the dramatization of these thematic views.

  In On Crime Writing Macdonald says, “Detective story writers are often asked why we devote our talents to working in a mere popular convention. One answer is that there may be more to our use of convention than meets the eye … The literary detective has provided writers since Poe with a disguise, a kind of welder’s mask enabling us to handle dangerously hot material.” He was, of course, talking about Lew Archer and the Archer series. But he might also have been referring to this and his other early novels.

  Like all of Macdonald’s work, The Dark Tunnel is a novel of insight, ambition and social commentary disguised as pure entertainment. The fact that it succeeds on this level as well as on that of spy thriller and suspense novel—and the concomitant fact that 36 years after its publication it can be read and appreciated as much more than a literary and/or historical curiosity—is a tribute to the talent and vision of Kenneth Millar and his alter ego, Ross Macdonald.

  Bill Pronzini

  San Francisco, California

  CHAPTER I

  DETROIT IS USUALLY HOT and sticky in the summer, and in the winter the snow in the streets is like a dirty, worn-out blanket. Like most other big cities it is best in the fall, when there is still some summer mellowness in the air and the bleak winds have not yet started blowing down the long, wide streets. The heart of the city was clean and sunlit on the September afternoon that Alec Judd and I drove over from Arbana. The skyscrapers stood together against the powder-blue sky with a certain grotesque dignity, like a herd of frozen dinosaurs waiting for a thaw.

  Alec drove his car into a parking-lot off Jefferson and we got out and headed for the Book Tower Building. His legs were not long for his height, a couple of inches less than my six feet, but his long, aggressive stride compensated for the length of his legs and I had to stretch mine to keep up with him. At thirty-nine he was so fit that years of deskwork had failed to bow his shoulders.

  “Well, here we go,” he said. “Wish me luck.”

  “Like hell I will. You know what I think of your going in the Navy. Anyway, I’m the one that needs the luck.”

  “You don’t have to worry, they’ll take you.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “The Army turned me down last year.”

  “That was last year. They’ve given up using Superman as a standard.”

  “Perhaps the Army has. The Navy’s still pretty fussy, I hear. They want only men with hawk eyes who were born with a caul and can’t drown.”

  “Where does that leave me?” Alec said. “You’ve got ten years on me.”

  “They’ll snap you up in a hurry, and you know it. They’ve been casting yearning glances at you ever since Pearl Harbor.”

  Behind his optimistic square face and casual wisecracking manner Alec had a brain that cut through administrative work like a buzz saw and stacked it in neat piles like lumber. He had been head of the War Board at Midwestern University since war broke out and had piloted the university through the transition from a peacetime to a wartime program.

  His mind was as broad and humorous as his mouth, but when he got hold of an idea he held on like a bulldog. Now he had the idea that he wasn’t doing enough for the war effort and should join the Navy.

  We walked the rest of the way to the Book Tower Building in silence and took the elevator to the Naval Procurement offices on the ninth floor.

  The brown-faced officer behind the information desk stood up and put out his hand when Judd told him his name. “I’ve heard about you, Dr. Judd. I’m pleased to meet you, sir. My name’s Curtis.”

  “How do you do, Lieutenant,” Judd said as they shook hands.

  “Didn’t you help set up the V-12 program at Midwestern?” the officer asked.

  “That’s right. By the way, this is Dr. Branch.”

  Curtis and I shook hands. “I’ve heard your name, too, Dr. Branch,” he said with an expression that couldn’t remember where.

  “I’m secretary of the War Board,” I offered. “Not forever, I hope.”

  “What can I do for you gentlemen?” asked Curtis.

  “Tell us how to get into the Navy,” Judd said. “I’ve sent hundreds of boys over here in the last couple of years but I don’t know what to do now that I’m here myself.”

  “It’s easier to get in than to get out,” Curtis said with a white enamel smile, “if you’ve got the qualifications. Let’s see, I’d better take you one at a time.”

  He picked up a pen and took a slip of paper from a pile in the drawer of the desk. Then he turned to Alec and asked with a smile, “How many years of college?”

  “Too many,” Alec said. “About eight as a student, I guess, and fifteen as a teacher.”

  “That should be enough, eh? Dr. Branch?” He picked up another slip.

  “Seven years as a student, and I’ve been teaching five.”

  “Well,” Curtis said, “the first thing you men have to do is have your eyes tested. So many are rejected on account of eyes that we put that test first. Just take these slips down the hall and have a chair.” He handed us our slips and pointed to the right. “And Dr. Branch, you’d better take your glasses off to rest your eyes while you’re waiting for the doctor.”

  I took off my glasses. Curtis said, “Good luck,” as we went out the door. I followed Alec down the hall to the bare anteroom of the eye-testing department, and we sat down on two folding chairs against the wall.

  I returned to the subject that Alec and I had been arguing over for days: “I still don’t get it, Alec. You’re an irreplaceable man doing an essential job. What the hell do you want to join the Navy for?”

  He said with the cheerfulness of an obstinate man who intends to go right on being obstinate: “I told you. I have an urge to know what the wild Waves are saying.”

  “I’m trying to be serious and all you do is make lousy puns. It’s not that I care what you do. I’m wondering what’s going to happen to the War Board after you leave.”

  “It’ll muddle along the same as it has for the last two years. I’m not indispensable. Nobody’s indispensable, except Harry Hopkins. And anyway, they haven’t taken me yet.”

  “They will,” I said. “They’ll send you to Fort Schuyler for indoctrination and then give you a job somewhere doing exactly what you’re doing now. Your character is your fate, and you’re an executive. They’ll keep you away from water as if you had hydrophobia, and put you aboard an office building.”

  “Not if I can help it.” His jaw pushed out. “I’m tired of fighting this war with the seat of my pants.”

  “Johnny wants a gun,” I said bitterly. “Where would we be if everybody felt like that? It takes a lot of guts sometimes to go on holding down a civilian job when you want to get into the fun and games.”

  Alec didn’t like that. He flushed and snapped, “I suppose Guadal and Salerno were fireworks displays.”

  “Not to the men who were there. That’s not what I mean and you know it. I mean simply that you’re more useful where you are than you would be anywhere else.”

  “What about you?” Alec said. “Have you a hidden talent for naval warfare? What’s the War Board going to do without a secretary?”

  “You’re confusing the issue. If the Navy doesn’t get me, the Army will. They turned me down last year but they won’t this year. And I just happen to prefer the Navy, if I can get in. I like water better than land.”

  “My position exactly.”

  “Like hell it is. You’re too old for the draft, and you’ll never see sea duty anyway, unless you go to sea in a filing cabinet.”

  “That’s right,” Alec said with a grin that did not change the stubbornness of the jaw. “Make mock of my grey hairs.” He hadn’t any: the close-cut nap of hair on his head was as black as mine.

  The examining yeoman came in, a narrow-faced young man in a white tunic.

  “Which of you men i
s first?” he said. He went into the adjoining room and switched on the light over an eye-testing chart on the far wall.

  “Go ahead, Alec.” He got up and followed the yeoman, who shut the door behind him. In no more than a minute, he opened the door and came out smiling.

  “Favorable verdict?” I asked.

  “20/20. It sounds like something by H. G. Wells.”

  “Next,” the examiner said through the doorway. I stepped in and closed the door.

  “Stay where you are.” He handed me a piece of cardboard with a round hole in it. “Now look through this hole with the right eye and walk forward until you can read the letters at the top.”

  I moved forward a couple of steps and read the jumbled alphabet aloud. Another two steps and I could read everything on the card.

  “O.K.” the yeoman said. “Now go back and try it with the left eye. Read them backwards this time.”

  I had to trek nearly the whole length of the room before I could read the smallest letters at the bottom of the card.

  “Not so good,” the yeoman said. “How do you account for the comparative weakness of your left eye? Did anything ever happen to it?”

  “Yes,” I said. An old anger woke up and moved in my stomach. “A Nazi officer hit me across the face with his swagger stick in Munich six years ago. That eye’s never been the same since.”

  “No wonder you want to get into this war,” he said. “But I’m afraid the Navy won’t take you. Maybe the Army will, I don’t know.”

  “What’s my score?”

  “Not good enough, I’m sorry to say. Your right eye just about makes the grade but your left is way down. Too bad.”

  I said, “Thanks,” and walked out to the front office. I didn’t realize I could still be angry after six years, but my legs were stiff with rage. I put my slip on Curtis’s desk and sat down to wait for Alec.

  Curtis saw the figures on my slip and the look on my face and said, “That’s too bad, Dr. Branch.”