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Margaret Ellis Millar (1915-1994) - née Sturm |
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Overshadowed by her husband Kenneth Millar, who gained fame as Ross Macdonald, the Canadian-American Margaret Millar published several noteworthy mysteries, often puzzling until the last page, and the very last words. The critic and novelist H.R.F. Keating included Millar's Beast in View (1955) among the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published. Millar outlived her husband. Their daughter Linda died in 1970. Margaret Millar is surely one of late twentieth-century crime fiction's best writers, in the sense that the actual writing is her books, the prose, is of superb quality. On almost every page of this one there is some description, whether of a physical thing or a mental state, that sends a sharp ray of extra meaning into the readers mind. We talk of those vellum sheets the monks of old used to decorate with enamel-bright colours as illuminated manuscripts: Margaret Millar's images produce illuminated pages. (Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books by H.R.F. Keating, foreword by Patricia Highsmith, Carroll & Craf Publishers, 1996, p. 115) Margaret Millar was born Margaret Ellis Sturm, in Kitchener,
Ontario, Canada. Her father, Henry William Sturm, was a businessman, who
served as mayor of Kitchener. Her mother, Lavinia Ferrier, was the
daughter of a high school principal. At the age of nine, she won a
prize for a poem, but her first passion was music: she began to play
piano at the age of four. Millar's childhood heroes included Houdini. Her first stories Millar published in the Kitchener literary
annual; one of its editors was her future husband. Later she developed
an interest in archaeology. Millar attended the Kitchener-Waterloo
Collegiate
Institute, where she was top of her class, and the University of
Toronto (1933-1936), majoring
in classics. Before completing her degree, she married Kenneth Millar,
i.e. Ross Macdonald, in 1938. Between the years 1942 and 1944 the couple
lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Linda Millar, their daughter, was born in
1939. Her godfather was R.A.D. Ford, the Canadian diplomat, poet, and
editor. When Ford was assigned to Colombia in the late 1950s, the
Millars played with the idea of moving to Bogotá, when Linda would
attend a university, but the plan never realized. The Invisible Worm
(1941), Millar's first novel, introduced the psychiatrists detective Dr Paul Prye. "I began
writing when to put bed in September 1941, for an imaginary heart
ailment," she recalled. "After two weeks reading three or four
mysteries a day, I decided to write one and I spent the next two weeks
doing just that. I rewrote it twice and sold it to Doubleday." ('Millar, Margaret (Sturm)),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, 1975, p. 994) This novel, published by Doubleday, was followed by The Weak-Eyed Bat (1942), one of Millar's most traditional novels, and The Devil Loves Me (1942). All of them had
Paul Prye as the central character. Millar's first six books were set in Ontario. After the publication of The Weak-Eyed Bat, Will Cuppy said in the New York Herald-Tribune, that Millar was a "right up in the top rank bafflers, including the British." ('Margaret Millar' by John M. Reilly, in Ten Women of Mystery, edited by Earl F. Bargainnier, p. 224) Kenneth Millar's first novel, The Dark Tunnel (1944), which had been rejected by Random House, was accepted by Dodd, Mead & Company, because she was already publishing there. Dr. Prye is described in The Invisible Worm as "six feet, five inches tall. Dressed in immaculate white flannels topped with a navy-blue blazer, he looked like a man of the world, and the rather quizzical smile in his blue eyes suggested that he was also a man amused at the world." (Collected Millar: The First Detectives by Margaret Millar, Syndicate Books, 2017, p. 12) Prye's police contact, Inspector Sands of the Toronto Police Department, is a lonely, compassionate man of drab appearance. He is in the forefront in Wall of Eyes (1943) and The Iron Gates (1945), a psychological puzzle about a severed finger, horrifying dream of death, and an escape from a mental hospital. The plot to destroy the second wife of a succesful Toronto doctor succeeds. Its surprise ending pointed gave a hint of the way Millar would develop her subsequent books. When Millar's husband accepted an academic fellowship from the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbour, the family moved to the United
States. In Ann Arbour they befriended the noted British poet W. H. Auden.
He was a great mystery fan, who had read Millar's novels. Kenneth
Millar studied modern European literature under Auden. In turn, he
encouraged the couple in their writing. Since the end of the World War II, the Millar family lived in
Santa
Barbara. There she enjoyed swimming and sailing. Their house, situated in a wooded canyon, was not always
a place of peaceful literary life. Both writers had a temper. To be
able to concentrate on their work, they wrote in different parts of the
house, Margaret in the morning, Kenneth in the afternoon. Once
Millar threw an egg at her husband, it splattered on the wall where she
left it to dry. Moreover, she was always afraid that some other woman
would steal her husband from her. From 1950, most of the Millar mysteries were set in California, Vanish in an Instant (1952) was laid to Ann Arbor. Her
home town, Santa Barbara, was variously named Santa Felicia and San
Felice. Their house survived the Coyote Fire of 1964, but was complete destroyed in 1977 in the Sycamore Fire. Upon abandoning the amateur detective Prye, Millar created such detectives as Eric Meecham, an attorney, Paul Blackshear, a semi-retired stockbroker, and Tom Aragon, a young Hispanic lawyer, and such PI's as Joe Quinn and Steve Pinata, an orphan of Mexican parentage. Unlike her husband with Lew Archer, Millar did not have interest in develping a long series around one character. "Even as a mystery writer her early books were ccomparatively commonplace. It is the half-dozen books beginning with Beast in View (1955) that show the full scope of her skill as a novelist whose theme is almost always a mystery with roots deeply hidden in the past." (Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History by Julian Symons, Viking, 1985, p. 174) Between 1945 and 1946, Millar
worked as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers, Hollywood, California.
She wrote the screenplay for The Iron Gates, which had bought its movie
rights for fifteen thousand dollars. In
1955, she won the best novel Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of
America for A Beast in View. Anthony Boucher wrote, that it is
"a pure terror-suspense-mystery story, complete with murder, detective
and surprise twist. But it is also so detailedly convincing a study in
abnormal psychology, so admirably written with such complete
realization of every character, that the most bitter antagonist of
mystery fiction may be forced to acknowledge it as a work of art." ('Margaret Millar' by John M. Reilly, in Ten Women of Mystery, ed. by Earl F. Bargainnier, p. 224) The
story starts with a disturbing telephone call. Helen Clarvoe, a
thirty-year-old spinster thinks it came from a mad woman. Paul
Blackshear, semi-retired stockbroker, sets out to track down the
caller. Evelyn Merrick is the elusive telephone stalker, who is
hounding Helen and who has been briefly married to Helen's homosexual
brother. Following Millar's Edgar win, she served as president of the Mystery
Writers of America. In 1982, Millar was named a Grand Master by that organization
and in 1986 she received Derrick Murdoch Award. Millar also wrote non-mystery novels. The first was Experiment in Springtime
(1947). In the 1960s, she was very active with her husband in the
conservation movement in California. They helped found a chapter of the
National Audubon Society. In 1965, she was named a Woman of the Year by
Los Angeles Times. Her observations on the wildlife in the canyons near her home were collected in The Birds and the Beasts Were There
(1968). "Some kinds of addiction are considered incurable," Millar
wrote in the book. "A bird watcher can be confined to a room with the
blinds drawn and the windows closed tight. But when one of the windows
is opened and a snatch of bird song drifs in, when a blind is raised
and a small creature wings by, or certain leaves in a tree stir without
wind, the addiction is more powerful than ever." (Ibid., Capra Press, 1991, p. 5) Millar died in Santa
Barbara of a heart attack on 26 March 1994. She admired the writing of
Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Katherine Mansfied, and Rosamond
Lehmann, among others. Millar's interest in psychology helped her to create interesting caracters, especially women, whose instability lead to dramatic events. As in the gothic romances, women are nearly always at the center of the plot, usually cast as victims, with some notable exceptions, such as Miss Helen Clarvoe in A Beast in View. But this character also had a profound effect on Millar. As she recalled: "Reader's letters indicated it had same effect on them. I was threatened with a libel suit, informed by a patient in a mental institution that at last she had found someone who really understood her, invited to join a coven of witches.... Helen Clarvoe and I made a good team. I hope we never meet." (Murder Most Fair: The Appeal of Mystery Fiction by Michael Cohen, 2000, pp. 76-77) A Stranger in My Grave
(1960) is among Millar's best works. It depicts a young woman who has a
recurrent nightmare in which she sees her own grave. And one day she
actually does see the grave she has deamed about. The Fiend (1964), dominated by an atmosphere of suspense and suspicion, tells of a
man named Charlie Gowen, thirty-two years old, who is a registred sex
offender. "The conditions were impossible, of
course. He couldn't turn and run in the opposite direction every time
he saw a child. They were all over, everywhere, at any hour. Once even
at midnight when he was walking by himself he'd come across a boy and a
girl, barely twelve. He had told them gruffly to go home or he'd call
the police. They disappeared into the darkness; he never saw them again
even though he took the same route at the same time every night after
that for a week." (Ibid., Random House, 1964, p. 4) Charlie's
brother Ben helps him. When a little girl disappears, Charlie
becomes the prime suspect. "Millar’s brilliance here is to make the man
the most sympathetic character in the book, hardly a small feat." ('Margaret Millar: The original Canadian queen of crime' by Sarah Weinman, National Post, August 26, 2013) Banshee
(1983), perhaps Millar's most emotional story, dealt with the theme of loss. A young girl, called
Princess, disappears and is later found dead. How Like an Angel (1962)
examined changing cultural values. The protagonist is Joe Quinn, a
gambler and former private detective. He drifts to a remote religious
community, a cult called the True Believers. Sister Blessing persuades
him to search a supposedly dead man, Patrick O'Gorman. Quinn is an
outsider, who has no plans for the future. During his casual
investigation, Quinn becomes involved with O'Gorman's widow Martha. As
if foretelling the emergence of hippie communities, Millar depicts
partly realistically, partly understanding the alternate lifestyle of
the people, who have withdrawn from the society, and try to manage
without modern conveniences. The solution to the puzzle of the plot is given on the last page. Most of Beyond This Point Are Monsters
(1970) consists of a court hearing, which gradually reveals truth under
deception. "What a shock it is to discover the world is round and the
areas merge and nothing separates the monsters and ourselves; that we
are all whirling around in space together and there isn't even a
graceful way of falling off. Knowledge can be a dreadful thing." (Beyond This Point Are Monsters, Random House, 1970, p. 144) The
title is taken from a warning at the edge of a reproduced medieval map
once owned by Robert Osborne. He has disappeared, but his body has not
been found. The book also deals with problems of Hispanic migrant
workers in southern California. "No wonder, reading the book before
writing this, I twice laid it down and murmured aloud 'Jesus, how well
she writes.'" (Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books by H.R.F. Keating, 1987, p. 72) After her daughter's death in 1970, at the age of thirty-one, Millar published no fiction for six years. Ask for Me Tomorrow (1976) was about a young Hispanic lawyer Tom Aragon on the trail of a wealthy woman's missing first husband, who vanished years ago with a Mexican girl. According to rumors he is alive and has made a fortune. Aragon also featured in two followings novels. The humorous The Murder of Miranda (1979) centers around the rich widow of the title, Miranda Shaw, and the head lifeguard at a Californian beach club, Grady Keaton. They are missing. The mystery is revealed in the last words of the final sentence. In Mermaid (1982) Aragon is hired to to find a mentally retarded young woman, Cleo. There is a change of point of view in the last third of the book. Spider Webs (1986) is a courtroom thriller with a racial theme. In the story Cully Paul King, a black captain of a private yacht and a well-know womanizer, is accused of murder. For further reading: 'Margaret Millar (1915-1994),' in Lisää kovaa kyytiä ja kaunokaisia: Kirjoituksia lajityyppikirjallisuudesta by Juri Nummelin (2020); Atomic Renaissance: Women Mystery Writers of the 1940s and 1950s by Jeffrey Marks (2003); 'Margaret Millar,' in The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction, compiled by Mike Ashley (2002); 'Margaret Millar' by Virginia S. Hale, in Great Women Mystery Writers, ed. by Kathleen Gregory Klein (1994); 'Millar, Margaret (Ellis, née Sturm)' by Edward D. Hoch, in Twentieth Century Mystery and Crime Writers, edited by John M. Reilly (1985); 'Margaret Millar' by John M. Reilly, in Ten Women of Mystery, edited by Earl F. Bargainnier (1981); 'Millar, Margaret (Sturm)),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975) Selected bibliography:
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