Dennis R. McMillan by Jim Nisbet

D. Ray McMillan 


by Jim Nisbet

            Dennis McMillan hatched out on April 8, 1950, and nobody has come close to putting him back.

            D-Ray, as the older among his many friends call him, retains the distinct drawl of his home town, Wichita, and the upstanding citizens of his native ville savor no more than he his more or less permanent absence.  But ever a shadow of potential, remote though it may be, troubles the town, that D-Ray McMillan may one day return to haunt the local psyche in much the way that he and his works have haunted the national one for some twenty-five years. 

            And haunt it they have.  After taking a degree and additional graduate courses in mathematics at Kansas State University, Den­nis was pursuing a Ph.D., in inner and outer pharmacology, at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, when he discovered his interest in publishing.  He milled notable titles from the git-go.  The House of Caine [1983] by Arthur Upfield; Philip Jose Farmer's erotic-gothic, Love Song[1983]; a reprint of Now and On Earth [1986], Jim Thompson's first book (long out of print then, and long out of print now).  And lo the moist and psoriatic tridactyl of fate nudged him into the path of legendary novelist and fellow misan­thrope, Charles Willeford, and the rest, as they say, is anthro­pology.

            Before long Dennis had forced a miniscule but discerning pub­lic to reconsider Willeford's New Forms of Ugly [1987], which, too, had -- and has -- been allowed to fall out of print.  Other writers, Willeford continuously, Fredric Brown encyclopedically, fol­lowed. 

            Much of Mr. Brown's work had fallen by the wayside.  Voilà, as the years went by, Dennis McMillan Publications presented no fewer than twenty volumes by Mr. Brown.  Today, a complete set of the Brown books is worth quite a lot of money.  And before he completed the Brown cycle D-Ray had solidified most of the ele­ments that he has brought to bear on subsequent titles: striking­ly designed well-made books filled to bursting with uncompromis­ing literature.  The limited first edition consists generally of boards wrapped in French-marbled paper created by a foremost au­thority on the process,  tasty foil-stamped end pa­pers, flap doodles and interior decorations, all of which is bound in Morocco with a Morocco slipcase.  It's a book to have and to hold.

            Morocco, by the way, is a goatskin leather chewed to the tex­ture of al dente calimari by buxom Aztec virgins chained to red­wood trees, and then it's tanned with sumac.  Morocco is also used for shoes.  These two elements -- the sumac, which inspires a rash upon contact, and the shoes, of which D-Ray sports a sar­torial variety, in scope and in scale just short of Imeldaic -- speak metaphorical volumes about the integration of the publish­er's psyche with the fruition of his ambitions. 

            Along with his limited first editions, McMillan also commonly issues a trade edition, by means of which he throws into the face of a careless yet needy reading public writers and works uncom­promising in their searing projection of a world gone mad and patting itself on the back for having done so.  To the words of Willeford and Brown, James Crumley and Kent Anderson, Scott Phillips and Kent Harrington, Michael Connelly and Rick DeMari­nis, Howard Browne and many others, McMillan lends the luster of deft execution and the crescendoing caché of his imprint, now renowned throughout the small world of discerning collectors but also among the broader vista of readers hungry for the joinery of papless reflection, for meaningful savagery in the face of a blunderbuss society, for articulation of the inchoate lockjaw of outrage that few, in fact, have transcended in the novel, and that far, far fewer publishers dare to promote.  As a publisher, Dennis McMillan is no stranger to risk, and does not care to be.  Risk is a factor, of course, but it does not rule his taste.  More generally, we might borrow a phrase from Jean Genet and put it at the head of the bibliography of D-Ray McMillan: "[I]f I examine my work, I now perceive in it, patiently pursued, a will to rehabilitate persons, objects and feelings reputedly vile." 

Long may he run.