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Jose Dolan, c. 1915. She talked her way into a nursing program for which students had to be 18 (she was 15) and have two years of high school (she had none). (Courtesy of Josephine Hammett Marshall)

Dashiell and Jose Hammett’s daughters, Mary and Jo, c. 1930. His daughters drove some of the best of Hammett’s biography. (Courtesy of Josephine Hammett Marshall)

Dashiell Hammett, 1933. The man Jose Dolan met in 1920 had untreatable tuberculosis, an 8^th grade education, no money, and a sketchy job history. Eleven years later, Lillian Hellman met Hollywood’s wealthy and famous man of the hour, whose TB was in permanent remission. (Granger, NYC)

Lillian Hellman, 1941. Her Watch on the Rhine opened on Broadway and Hammett wrote the screenplay for the film version. They were civil rights activists together, and, despite absences and infidelities, loved each other until Hammett died 20 years later. (Photofest)

Cissy Pascal, 1913, the year Raymond Chandler met her. She was a showy redhead, she was fun, and she was happy. He got the idea that he couldn’t fail her. (UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library)

Raymond Chandler, 1918. He was 30, in love with a married woman, and supporting his mother with whom he lived. Chandler escaped into the Canadian Army. (Mina Whiting/UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library)

Raymond Chandler, 1939, the year of his breakthrough novel, The Big Sleep. Chandler was 51. Cissy was 69, always sick, and didn’t like her husband’s first novel or any of those that followed. (Photofest)

Raymond Chandler, c. 1947. Los Angeles’s knight errant scowls on one of its beaches in a photograph for Condé Nast. (George Platt Lynes/Condé Nast Archive/CORBIS)

Kenneth Millar, c. 1921, in Kitchener, Ontario, walled in by dour adult relatives, including his mother, far right. He felt guilty in the face of circumstances he could not possibly have been responsible for, much less controlled. (Mary V. Carr/Courtesy of Tom Nolan)

The Millar Family, 1948, on a trip home to Kitchener. Margaret Millar was already a popular mystery writer. Her husband Ken (pen name Ross Macdonald), with two minor books published, was trying to play his wife’s game. Their daughter Linda was nine years old. (University of Waterloo Library)

Eudora Welty, c. 1970s. A chance meeting in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel in 1971 expanded into the easiest, healthiest, romantic relationship Macdonald ever had. As for Welty, he was the love of her life. (Photofest)

Ross Macdonald, 1975. His later, best novels made him a man at the far side of pain. He had written himself well—or well enough. (Photofest)