Margaret Millar

• Born: February 5, 1915
• Birthplace: Kitchener, Ontario, Canada
• Died: March 26, 1994
• Place of death: Santa Barbara, California

Types of Plot: Psychological; inverted

Principal Series: Dr. Paul Prye, 1941-1942; Inspector Sands, 1943-1945; Tom Aragon, 1976-1982

Contribution

Margaret Millar began her writing career with three successive novels about the amusing psychoanalyst-detective Dr. Paul Prye, but she became successful when she decided to make the psychological profiles of demented criminals and their victims her focus. With The Iron Gates (1945), her sixth book, Millar scored her first major success. The book centers on the effect that the monsters of fear can have on the mind of an outwardly happy, well-adjusted, well-to-do woman.

After The Iron Gates, Millar wrote more than a dozen books of suspense, most of which have been both critically acclaimed and commercially successful. She helped turn the psychological thriller into an art form, and she created books brimming with three-dimensional characterizations: real, breathing people, portrayed in crisp, vivid prose.

Millar’s novels are concerned with the inner life of the individual, with the distortions of reality that psychopathology and stressful situations can forge in the mind. Although Millar did not focus as heavily on social analysis as did her husband, Ross Macdonald, her novels do present current social concerns whose treatment deepens over the span of her work. Her characters exist in Freudian microcosms, shaped and determined by their significant relationships: parent/child, husband/wife, brother/sister.

Biography

Margaret Millar was born Margaret Ellis Sturm in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, on February 5, 1915, to Henry William Sturm and Lavinia Ferrier Sturm. Young Margaret’s first love was music. She studied the piano from an early age and became an accomplished player, giving recitals when she was still in high school. At the Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate Institute, she was a member of the debating team, along with Kenneth Millar, who would later become her husband. Their first stories appeared together in their high school magazine, The Grumbler, in 1931. While attending the University of Toronto from 1933 through 1936, Margaret majored in classics and developed a lifelong interest in psychology that would figure strongly in her work. She and Kenneth Millar were married on June 2, 1938, after his graduation from the same university.

After the birth of her only child, Linda Jane, in 1939, Millar was ordered to remain in bed because of a heart ailment. An invalid for some time, she began to write mysteries, achieving early success with The Invisible Worm (1941)—a success that allowed her husband to give up teaching high school and return to graduate school full time. Margaret’s success also inspired Kenneth to begin his own attempts at writing; as her first reader and editor (though never her collaborator), he said that he learned to write from observing her work. To avoid confusion with his wife’s growing fame, he adopted the pen name Ross Macdonald. Ironically, though both were successful crime novelists, and she the more widely read at the outset, his reputation would eventually eclipse hers.

While Kenneth served in the U.S. Navy, Margaret relocated the family to Santa Barbara, with which she had fallen in love during a trip to see him off. Santa Barbara would be a frequent setting in her novels, thinly disguised as “Santa Felicia” and “San Felice,” and her books were often bathed in the brilliant sunlight of her adopted home. For a short period Millar worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood (1945-1946), but the bulk of her literary output was novels—mostly, but not exclusively, mysteries.

Millar and her husband shared a passion for environmental concerns that led them to found a chapter of the National Audubon Society in Santa Barbara, protest an oil spill and establish the Santa Barbara Citizens for Environmental Defense, and work together to protect the endangered California condor. They were ardent dog lovers and bird-watchers, and nearly collaborated on The Birds and Beasts Were There (1968), which Margaret would eventually write alone.

Millar and her husband also shared the tragedy of their troubled daughter. At the age of seventeen, Linda killed a child while driving under the influence of alcohol. Two years later she dropped out of college because of the continuing weight of guilt and psychological problems. Though she later returned to her family, she died at the age of thirty-one, in 1970. Millar published nothing for six years after her daughter’s death.

Millar attributed her interest in writing detective novels to having been an avid reader of suspense fiction from the age of eight. She became a world-class best-selling writer, and her books were translated into French and Swedish. She twice received the coveted Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America, for Beast in View (1955) and Banshee (1983). Two other novels, How Like an Angel (1962) and The Fiend (1964), were runners-up for Edgar awards. In 1965, she was named the Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year. The Mystery Writers of America honored her with the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in 1983 and made her the organization’s president from 1957 to 1958. In 1986 Millar received the Derrick Murdoch Award from the Crime Writers of Canada. Faced with increasing blindness and grieving over her husband’s suffering and eventual death from Alzheimer’s disease in 1983, Millar completed only one more novel after that year. She died of a heart attack on March 26, 1994.

Analysis

Margaret Millar first began writing in the style of classic Golden Age detection, with series series characters, plots that challenge readers to race to solve the crime before the end, final revelatory chapters, and even her version of the English country-house mystery. Each of her series characters appears in three books, though one, The Devil Loves Me (1942), includes both Prye and Sands. Her first books, The Invisible Worm and The Weak-Eyed Bat (1942), were good-natured, amusing mysteries with some clever psychological twists and insights. With her short series featuring the Toronto detective Inspector Sands, she settled into a more serious style and began to establish herself as a master of the psychological thriller.

The first of her books to win both critical and popular acclaim was The Iron Gates. This was her second and last book with Sands as the detective-hero. For decades, Millar abandoned the series format and wrote her novels as separate works of fiction that share only an emphasis on the psychological portrait. Each of her novels (until the Tom Aragon series in 1976) introduces the reader to a completely new cast of characters and set of circumstances. In her three or four best books, such as The Fiend, How like an Angel, and Beast in View, Millar created highly original and self-contained works of literature that would not have been served by having to conform to a series format.

It can be argued that the second of Millar’s series characters, Inspector Sands, simply faded into the background of her books. He is a thoroughly uninteresting character whose sole mark of distinction is that he has no distinction. Indistinguishable from millions of other graying, middle-aged men, he has “no strong sense of identity” and lives “in a vacuum.” With Millar’s interest in the psychologically and physically colorful, such a character was bound to be short-lived.

Millar’s final venture into the realm of the series detective, with Tom Aragon, belongs more to the psychological portrait novels of her later writing. Dark and often disturbing in tone, the three Aragon books are far from the amusement of Prye or the careful and successful detection of Sands. Aragon is thrust into situations that test his morals as well as his detecting skills, and he himself is nearly the victim of some of his mysteries, as in Ask for Me Tomorrow (1976), in which he is framed for a series of murders that follow his efforts at investigation—an investigation that he later learns has made him an unwitting accomplice of the murderer.

Although Millar does not follow any set formula in writing her novels, there are several features they share. Complex webs of plotting provide a high level of suspense that is usually resolved in the end in a final revelatory scene. During the course of the novel, shifts in perception and ongoing reinterpretations create a whirling effect of constant surprise in which things are never as they seem. For the most part, Millar’s talent at plotting and penetrating characterization makes these shifts wholly believable, as the reader constantly comes to new understandings along with the characters. Each of her books focuses on the inner life of one character. Usually this character is under some kind of stress, caused by either a set of outward circumstances that challenges the character’s notions about reality or some kind of psychological disorder. In Banshee, the mysterious circumstances surrounding a young girl’s death change all the people around her and their relationships in sad and shocking ways.

In The Fiend, the protagonist is a young man whose mental problems cause his sense of reality and agency to slip. This novel brings out another feature of Millar’s books: Reader are invited to merge their consciousness with that of the protagonist, Charlie Gowen, a convicted child molester. Once inside Gowen’s mind, readers are treated to a ride on an experiential roller-coaster. The world perceived by Charlie Gowen—or any other of Millar’s mental cases—is distorted. Reality changes shape, and what was familiar becomes alien and threatening. In Charlie Gowen’s world, children are not simply smaller and cuter than adults, they are dangerously alluring.

Beast in View

Most of Millar’s books written after the Sands series are not whodunits per se. They are psychological thrillers, where the suspense lies in the acts of deception—either by cunning criminals, as in An Air That Kills (1957), or by a tormented mind, as in Beast in View—that implant distortions into the minds of the other characters and the reader. The books are chronicles of psychological afflictions and their slow and painful unraveling.

Beast in View, one of Millar’s best novels, tells the story of a woman with a disorder known in psychology as multiple personality. Helen Clarvoe, a rich and lonely single woman, is being persecuted by Evelyn Merrick, a homicidal and demented young woman whom she once knew. The book chronicles the movements and thoughts of the two women as they dance a dance of death and destruction, only to merge them at the end as the two sides of one woman. Clearly influenced by the theories of both Sigmund Freud and R. D. Laing, the book is a record of the effects parental pressure can have when exerted on a fragile personality.

How Like an Angel

In How Like an Angel, Millar focuses on another weak and defenseless person: a man caught between two women, one strong and domineering, the other offering him pleasure and a chance to assert himself. Millar also introduces in this book one of California’s numerous religious sects, replete with a slightly deranged leader, a rich and senile old woman, and a coven of colorful and clearly drawn disciples in white robes and bare feet. The hero of the book, Quinn, a sometime Las Vegas detective and gambler down on his luck, embarks on a quest for truth like a prince in a fairy tale. In the end, he has obtained not only knowledge about the mysterious events surrounding the disappearance and presumed death of Patrick O’Gorman but also insights about himself and the world that allow him to claim the prize and marry the princess/widow.

In How Like an Angel, as in all Millar’s books, the emphasis is on characterization and on psychological revelations. Millar is a master at describing children, primarily little girls. She created a series of portraits of nine-year-old girls starting with The Cannibal Heart (1949) and culminating with The Fiend. The portrait in How Like an Angel of the pimpled teenage girl is wonderfully penetrating and compelling. Even in weaker books, such as Banshee, which is marred by overwriting and bad similes, there are two fascinating portrayals of young girls who invite the reader into their world of fantasy and confusion about the verbal and physical behavior of grown-ups.

The Fiend

Even when the central characters are adults, they are often remarkably childish and lost in a confusing world belonging to and defined by others. In The Fiend, the two protagonists, Charlie Gowen and his fiancé, Louise Lang, are outsiders who cannot fit into the adult world of marriage and adultery. In Charlie’s case the result has been disastrous: He, with his nine-year-old emotions and adult body, has forced himself onto a little girl. He suffers the consequences, jail and a lifelong fear of committing a similar crime.

In the character of Charlie Gowen, Millar’s writing is at its best. One sees her ability to depict a beleaguered mind. Yet in Charlie’s character one also sees Millar’s primary weakness: the creation of believable dialogue. Charlie Gowen is a college-educated man who holds down a job, but he speaks like a nine-year-old boy. It is hard to accept that he could have completed even the fifth grade, much less college, and it is equally hard to believe that he has a job and manages to stay out of a mental institution.

That children are trapped inside adults is a central idea in Millar’s books. Another character in The Fiend, the immature Kate Oakley, combines an inability to face the world without the mediating agency of a man with a childish distrust and hatred of men. She is a typical Millar character, unable to function as an adult in her private or public life. Almost all Millar’s books feature characters who are locked in an infantile universe, with no escape other than crime and murder.

It is interesting that these books that chronicle the lives and worlds of people who cannot cope are written with almost clinical detachment. Millar seems to be more interested in dissecting sick minds than in expressing any sympathy for those who suffer or in trying to assess the social causes of individual disaster. The stories are absorbing because they are so convincingly told. Even Millar’s weakest books are so suspenseful that neither bad similes nor her propensity for heavy-handed metaphor turns the reader away. Before everything else, Millar is a master of the plot, of the slow unfolding of a multifaceted story. Her psychological insight, great as it is, remains secondary to the genius of her architectonic plots.

Principal Series Characters:

• Dr. Paul Prye is a youngish, very tall and very bookish (his favorite author is William Blake) psychoanalyst who tends to get involved in murder mysteries. A bit clumsy but quick on the repartee, Prye attracts and is attracted to beautiful women.
• Inspector Sands is both less flamboyant and less visually conspicuous than Paul Prye. He is described as “a thin, tired-looking middle-aged man with features that fitted each other so perfectly that few people could remember what he looked like.” Inspector Sands is with the Toronto Police Department and has almost as much trouble keeping his police cohorts in line as he has with the ingenious murderers prowling the streets of Toronto. He is, however, always successful, thanks to his intelligence and quiet insistence.
• Tom Aragon , though a series character, has greater depth than Prye or Sands, and his books hold a darker tone more in keeping with the artistic psychological thrillers that Millar had developed by that time. A young Hispanic lawyer, Aragon is very junior in his firm, and his talents at detection are sometimes tried by uncertainty or moral doubts about the investigation. His chief emotional support is his wife, Laurie MacGregor, with whom he has a modern, long-distance relationship, as she lives and works in another city; their frequent phone conversations help him clarify aspects of his cases.

Bibliography

Cooper-Clark, Diana. Designs of Darkness: Interviews with Detective Novelists. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1983. Features an interview with Millar, detailing her creative process and her thoughts on mystery and detective fiction.

Dubose, Martha Hailey, with Margaret Caldwell Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000. Essay on Millar compares her to five of her fellow female mystery novelists, examining her distinctive contribution to the genre.

Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Scholarly treatise on the thriller genre discussing four of Millar’s novels, from The Iron Gates to Beyond This Point Are Monsters. Bibliography and index.

Lachman, Marvin. “Margaret Millar: The Checklist of an Unknown Mystery Writer.” The Armchair Detective 3 (October, 1970): 85-88. Complete bibliography of Millar’s early works.

Lindsay, Elizabeth Blakesley, ed. “Margaret Millar.” Great Women Mystery Writers. 2d ed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. Contains biographical information and analysis of the author’s works.

Reilly, John M. “Margaret Millar.” In Ten Women of Mystery, edited by Earl F. Bargainnier. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981. Compares Millar with nine of her fellow female mystery writers, detailing her distinctive contributions to the genre.

Russell, Ruth Weber, ed. Women of Waterloo County. Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont.: Canadian Federation of University Women, 2000. This study of Ontarian women includes a chapter on Millar. Bibliographic references and index.