Kenneth Millar, who has written under the pseudonyms John Macdonald, John Ross Macdonald, and Ross Macdonald, was born in Los Gatos, California, on 13 December 1915, but was raised in Ontario, Canada. When Millar was three years old, his father abandoned his mother and him, which has had profound thematic significance in his novels. The boy was shifted from home to home and relative to relative in what Millar in 1971 termed an "episodic and unpredictable" childhood. He calculates that by the time he graduated from an Ontario high school in 1932, he had lived in fifty rooms, and he regarded his nomadic existence and family poverty with shame and embarrassment.

Millar enrolled at the University of Western Ontario in 1932. In the winter of 1936-1937, he dropped out of college and went to Europe, where he spent two months in Nazi Germany. His impressions of the evils of the Hitlerian philosophy are...