The Couple Next Door: Collected Short Mysteries

Not many mystery readers in the twenty-first century, it seems, are familiar with the byline of Margaret Millar, who died in 1994. But during her nearly fifty-year career, this unique author — a forerunner of such psychologically sophisticated contemporary genre figures as Ruth Rendell, Minette Walters and P. D. James — helped shape the nature of modem mystery and suspense fiction.

Margaret Ellis Sturm Millar, born in Canada in 1915 and an American resident since 1941, earned an international reputation in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s as a superb storyteller and a master of her craft. Most of her books were published in translation throughout Europe and Asia; several still are. She won an Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1956 (and was nominated over the years for two more), was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America that same year, in 1983 was named an MWA Grand Master, and in 1986 was given the Crime Writers of Canada’s Derrick Murdoch Award.

Her earliest books were light-comic murder mysteries (though they featured one of the earliest psychiatrist-sleuths in detective fiction). But soon Margaret Millar turned more serious, with a string of memorable novels that pioneered the field of “psychological suspense.” Later she returned to a semi-comic mode, mixing satire into her stories of homicide and psychosis.

She paid equal attention to plot and character, and she tried to make every word count. Her works, full of surprises and streaked with wit, were admired by all sorts of knowledgeable readers: from “Golden Age” star Agatha Christie to hard-boiled master Raymond Chandler, from expert reviewers Anthony Boucher and Anatole Broyard to European critics including Alfred Andersch and Julian Symons. It was said that Truman Capote, with whom for years she shared a publisher, asked Random House for copies of her novels as soon as they came out.

In today’s mystery-reader magazines and Internet discussion groups, those who remember Margaret Millar often bemoan her having labored for the last twenty years of her writing life in the shadow of her betterknown husband Kenneth Millar, also a mystery writer, who used the pseudonym Ross Macdonald. Rarely mentioned are the twenty years before those, when Margaret Millar’s success and reputation greatly outpaced her husband’s.

Margaret Millar’s own literary choices contributed to her relative eclipse in the mystery field. In art as in life, “Maggie” Millar went her own way. She abandoned two popular series characters in favor of doing mostly one-of-a-kind, “stand-alone” novels. Often she wrote books outside the genre: mainstream novels, a nonfiction work about birds. At the start of the 1970s, she said she’d retired — then returned in 1976 to do five more books.

Throughout all phases, her husband was her great champion. Kenneth and Margaret often suggested plots to one another, and they read each other’s work with pleasure — each claiming the other was the better writer. The Millars had such different styles and sensibilities, it seemed possible that they might start with the same story premise and produce quite dissimilar novels (and, once or twice, they did just that).

She was the first to publish a book, but he was first to break into paid print (through magazines). For a remarkable four decades, they complemented one another’s personal and professional ups and downs. Leading a seemingly bland existence — whether living frugally in Ontario, Canada, where both began writing in the late 1930s; or living frugally in wealthy Santa Barbara, California, their home from 1946 until their deaths — they were the strikingly talented, mutually diligent, far-from-ordinary couple next door.

Though bestknown for her novels, Margaret Millar wrote a handful of mystery and suspense short stories highly prized (for their quality as well as scarcity) by anthologists: “published, republished, and rerepublished,” as their creator acknowledged. This volume collects those stories for the first time, along with two early novelettes never before between book covers. In these tales, a reader can trace the author’s development from a competent beginner into an accomplished and highly individual storyteller.

The short story would seem an ideal form for Margaret Millar, who, once she found her mature style, pared her text to the minimum. She combined this lean text with an extreme emphasis on suspense, attempting in some books to have her tale’s punchline delivered in the final sentence — sometimes in the final word.

Margaret Millar much enjoyed short stories — Somerset Maugham was a favorite author — and though she didn’t write many, she wrote them all through life. Her last published work was a short story; and, nearly sixty years earlier, short-story was the form in which she first saw print — when she and her future husband Kenneth were not yet the brilliant couple next door but only brilliant adolescent classmates in a high school in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.

Margaret Sturm and Kenneth Millar (pronounced “Miller”) were from opposite ends of the Kitchener social scale — her father was the town’s mayor, his father had years ago left Ken and Ken’s unwell mother to fend for themselves — but they had things in common. Both loved detective stories (and all sorts of other prose and poetry); Margaret, because of the copies of Black Mask, Detective Fiction Weekly, and other magazines she found hidden under her siblings’ mattresses: “I’ve been an avid reader of mysteries since the age of eight,” she later said. “Having two older brothers with catholic literary tastes, I was practically weaned on South American arrow poisons and Lunge’s reagent.”

Both Ken Millar and Margaret Sturm were conscious of being “young” and “ambitious,” qualities mentioned by each in stories they wrote for their high-school yearbooks: the first published work under any byline by either of these two budding authors. And they both wanted to be writers.

As literary editor of the Kitchener Collegiate Institute’s Grumbler, Ken Millar had the pleasure of accepting Margaret Sturm’s Somerset Maugham-inspired sketch for publication, along with his own parody of Sherlock Holmes-via-Stephen Leacock. He knew Margaret at school, of course (they were each on a debate team), and he often bumped into her at the library. He admired her looks and brains, and secretly followed her to choir practice. But he kept a shy distance from the mayor’s daughter, who — with her top grades, student office-holding, classics studies, and piano-playing on the radio — was probably the outstanding girl at KCI.

It was after they’d graduated high school that Ken got to know Margaret better; after his father and then his mother died, and he was on his way to Europe for several months’ sabbatical from his studies at the University of Western Ontario. He ran into Margaret on the street; she was attending the University of Toronto. He took her to tea, and invited her to accompany him to Ireland. (“Yes, he was serious,” she affirmed nearly sixty years later. “He was always serious.”) Margaret said no: nice Canadian girls didn’t go to Ireland on the first date.

When Kenneth saw her next, in 1937, Margaret was reading Thucydides (in the original Greek) in the London, Ontario, public library. Her own mother had died, and she’d dropped out of university. She was studying psychiatry and other subjects on her own, and more determined than ever to become a writer. She and Kenneth began keeping close company.

The day after he graduated with honors from UWO, they were married: on June 2, 1938. (A decade later, Ken Millar, writing as the pseudonymous Macdonald, would give his private-eye character Lew Archer June 2 as a birthdate.)

After marriage, the Millars moved for a year to Toronto, where Kenneth earned the teaching certificate needed to become a high-school instructor. Despite her attempts to avoid becoming a mother, Margaret recalled, “I got pregnant three months after we were married. We were both so dumb. I knew all about murder but nothing about sex.” In June of 1939, Margaret gave birth to the couple’s first and only child, Linda Jane.

Needing cash for the maternity-ward bill, Ken Millar wrote a batch of stories and poems aimed at the Toronto and New York magazine markets, which Margaret typed for submission on an Underwood portable he’d won from a radio quiz program. Ontario publications bought several of his pieces, making Ken Millar a pro.

Margaret, who’d wanted a writing career too, was less than delighted with the turn her life had taken.

“Probably,” she said in 1990, “if we’d each had a lot of money, maybe we would have gotten a divorce; I don’t know. He wouldn’t have wanted to, but I would have, because — a woman feels funny, when she’s married; especially a very independent type, like me. You feel trapped, you know? ‘Here I am, what have I done with my life? I haven’t done anything.’ And especially then because I had a child in just a little over a year, and that’s when you really feel — the entrapment. You know: ‘Here I am — stuck.’”

Things got worse when Ken Millar took a job teaching at their old high school in Kitchener. He liked the work well enough, but Margaret felt more isolated than ever.

“I think the greatest satisfaction of being a teacher,” Ken Millar said many years later, “is that it allows you to relive your adolescence in a sense and do something about it which will help other people... The trouble was I spent all my time teaching and had very little time to spend with my wife, which was one of the things that made her into a writer that first year.”

Margaret sought creative outlets. She proposed writing movie reviews for a Toronto newspaper, but the paper turned her down. She wrote some humor pieces, some of which may have been bought by the same “Sunday-school” magazines that took Ken Millar’s first efforts; but there was no real future in doing more of the same.

When a doctor diagnosed her as having what Margaret later called “an imaginary heart ailment,” she took to her bed for weeks. Ken brought her books to read from the public library, twenty or thirty at a time: mostly mysteries, which were having a publishing heyday in 1940. “One day I was reading one of these,” she later recalled, “and it suddenly occurred to me, ‘I can do better than this.’”

With her husband’s encouragement, and still working in bed, Margaret wrote a 60,000-word mystery in fifteen days, then rewrote it twice, with Ken’s editorial help.

The Invisible Worm, by Margaret Millar — a comic murder mystery with a psychoanalyst-detective, the six-foot-five Dr. Paul Prye — was published by Doubleday Doran in 1941. Margaret Millar never looked back.

As Margaret Millar’s life underwent drastic change, so did her husband’s. The A-plus average Ken Millar had earned in summertime graduate-school courses at the University of Michigan won him a fellowship at that American school. Margaret’s new career allowed Ken to quit his Kitchener high-school teaching job, move the family to Ann Arbor in 1941, and teach there while working full-time towards a doctorate.

Maggie meanwhile lost no time writing a second Paul Prye mystery, then a third. Her books attracted a growing number of readers, and praise from the top U.S. detective-story reviewers (including the New York Herald Tribune’s Will Cuppy, who dubbed Margaret Millar “a mystery find of considerable voltage” and “a humdinger, right up in the top rank of bafflers, including the British”).

A piece about her in the Ann Arbor newspaper, in August of 1941 (four months before America entered World War II), reported that the 26-year-old author’s handwritten labors had been so intense in the preceding year that she now suffered from writer’s cramp. Maggie didn’t let that pain slow her down. She wasn’t about to lose momentum in the career she’d worked so hard to get started.

The same article said that, between writing two of the novels, “she turned out a novelette for the editors of The American magazine, who had read her first book and had liked it.” In fact, two novelettes were apparently written by Margaret Millar around this time — neither of which was published by The American.

“Last Day in Lisbon,” a tale of murder, espionage and romance amongst wartime refugees, seems custom-cut to the cloth of The Americans’s table-of-contents pattern; but it didn’t see print (in Dell’s Five-Novels Monthly) until 1943.

“Mind Over Murder,” a mystery featuring Dr. Paul Prye, might be the story Maggie wrote with The American in mind — or it could be a final, shortened version of that alluded-to, third Paul Prye adventure, “The Raven Is Hoarse.”

In any case, the 20,000-word novelette “Mind Over Murder,” included in the November, 1942, issue of Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine, seems to have been Margaret Millar’s first published mystery-fiction short story of any consequence.

In 1941, when “Mind Over Murder” seems to have been written, perhaps the best-selling detective-story writer in the world was Agatha Christie, whose intricately-choreographed puzzle-plots epitomized the first “Golden Age” of mystery fiction. Anyone writing in the genre at this time, especially a woman author, would be well aware of Christie as a point of comparison or departure. Whether as positive or negative inspiration, Agatha Christie was a presence to acknowledge in detective fiction in the 1940s. “Mind Over Murder” both evokes and parodies the Christie pattern.

As “Mind Over Murder” begins, ten people — an assortment of “mildly neurotic” patients, their doctors and attendants — are delivered by boat to a remote island in Lake Huron. This parallels the opening of Christie’s popular 1939 book, And Then There Were None (made into a 1944 play, Ten Little Indians, and a 1945 film), in which ten people unknown to one another are invited to a lonely island and become targets of an unseen killer.

The people killed in “Mind Over Murder” are described as looking in different ways like Indians: one is crudely scalped; another is “very dark, almost as dark as an Indian.” This too seems an intentional nod to Christie’s work. When the second corpse in Millar’s story is found, Dr. Prye thinks, “And now there are two” — another echo of Ten Little Indians.

The “Golden Age” device of a monogrammed handkerchief-as-clue, used in Murder on the Orient Express and other Christie books, is played with in “Mind Over Murder,” which ventilates the cozy mystery’s “closed environment” with forensic details and psychiatric symptoms more graphic than Mrs. Christie was wont to employ. Uncozy too is the blunt way Margaret Millar’s hero counters irrelevant sentimentality with harsh reality. When someone faced with a corpse asserts, Pollyanna-like, “There’s no death,” Prye says with distaste: “Then this is the next thing to it.”

Margaret Millar, in the vanguard of the post-Agatha Christie generation of mystery writers, was eager to create a more realistic thriller. At the same time, she was building on a genre whose conventions and popularity Christie had done much to create.

Another author, it seemed, was being responded to in “Mind Over Murder”: Ernest Hemingway, recently parodied by Ken Millar’s future inspiration Raymond Chandler in the 1940 novel Farewell, My Lovely (which also included a phony-talking “noble savage” Hollywood Indian).

In Farewell, Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe dubs a cop “Hemingway” and makes fun of his repetitive dialogue. “Mind Over Murder” has a character actually named Hemingway: a strongly-built, simple-thinking type who runs into trouble when he applies brute force to the matters at hand. Ken (and maybe Maggie) Millar felt Ernest Hemingway was a modern equivalent of the American frontier male: self-aware enough to be ironic but isolated from society’s more civilizing influences.

“Murder”’s Hemingway is juxtaposed with his dissipated charge, a man from the opposite end of the social-aesthetic spectrum: John Ross Prince III, who seems a caricature of hard-drinking Princeton alumnus and Ernest Hemingway friend-rival Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. J. R. Prince tells his keeper, “You’re no gentleman, Hemingway. You have never worked your way through Princeton. Princeton,” Prince jokes to Paul Prye, “was named after me.”

“Mind Over Murder,” despite its sophisticated touches, is a product of Margaret Millar’s beginning style; and its tagged-on romantic element falls flat. By the time “Mind Over Murder” found a home in Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine the following year, Margaret Millar was using a new detective hero, and writing a much different sort of book.

As much as they delighted newspaper reviewers and lending-library patrons, the light-comic mysteries Margaret Millar had written no longer satisfied their author. She hoped to create something more artful and substantial, and her critically astute husband assured her she had the talent to do it.

One notion was to write something that drew on the colorful aspects of her Kitchener childhood; and Ken helped her sketch out a possible play, with scenes involving her piano accompaniment for a radio pitchman and the like. Eventually Margaret wrote instead some nostalgic first-person prose vignettes, one of which, “Grandpa and the Weather,” was published in Woman’s Day magazine.

Instead of further exploring mainstream possibilities now, Margaret Millar went back to mystery fiction — but with a new seriousness.

The change was made with subtlety, in a third book with Dr. Paul Prye. At the start of The Devil Loves Me, a sardonically comical opening scene leads the reader to expect the Millar formula as before. But when series hero Prye’s intended wedding is interrupted by a poisoning death, the murder is investigated by a new protagonist: a drab Toronto police detective who’s everything the suave, smooth-talking, sharp-dressing Prye is not.

The nondescript Detective-Inspector Sands is small, with pale gray eyes and a pleasant, mild voice. There’s a stillness in his face and movements, “as if he has been dead a long time and is only going through the motions.” Outwardly calm, Sands is inwardly appalled (in the few glimpses the author allows of his interior state) by the world he investigates: “Indignity, Sands thought, the death of anything is an indignity. He walked on, swinging his arms savagely through the fog.”

With Paul Prye neatly married off, Inspector Sands was the sole investigator in Margaret Millar’s next novel manuscript, Wall of Eyes. In this somber and ambitious work, the focus was much more on the book’s supplemental characters and their emotional and social worlds; the police detective didn’t appear until page seventy-four, and then he seemed more enigmatic than ever:

Wall of Eyes, with its complex personalities and interesting settings (including a seedy Toronto night-club), was a major artistic departure and achievement for Margaret Millar.

But this radical-seeming manuscript struck her Doubleday editors like a bucket of cold water, and they threw it right back at her. The verdict from Doubleday’s Crime Club chief Isabelle Taylor was unequivocal: the book didn’t work. This wasn’t what Mrs. Millar’s readers (or publisher) wanted. Try again.

But Margaret believed in Wall of Eyes — and so did her at-home Ann Arbor editor, Kenneth. She didn’t want to scrap the best book she’d ever written. What to do?

An influential reader came to her rescue. Margaret had dropped the name of popular romance-novelist Faith Baldwin into her second book, The Weak-Eyed Bat; and Baldwin, a mystery addict, had begun a correspondence. When Margaret wrote her of Doubleday’s action, Baldwin advised she get an agent (the Millars had done without one for three books) and recommended her own: Harold Ober, one of the best in the business. The Ober Agency took Margaret Millar as a client and right away placed Wall of Eyes with Random House: one of the two or three top publishers in the country. An apparent career setback became a triumph.

Margaret Millar had followed her muse, and critics and readers had come right along with her.

Closer to home, her success was inspiring her husband to attempt a book of his own. After editing and helping plot Margaret’s first several books (Kenneth and Margaret were listed as co-authors on the books’ contracts, if not on the books themselves, until 1944), Ken Millar felt he’d learned enough about mystery technique and structure to try his own hand at a thriller. Working at night for a month in his small English Department office on the University of Michigan campus, Kenneth produced The Dark Tunnel, a spy story which Harold Ober sold to Dodd, Mead for their Red Badge detective-book imprint. Now both the Millars were professional mystery novelists.

Their friends in Ann Arbor — including other U of M junior-faculty couples, and mystery-writer H.C. Branson and his wife Anna — were thrilled for Ken’s and Maggie’s successes. The Millars had a small but interesting circle of acquaintances in Ann Arbor, including the African-American poet Robert Hayden, poet Chad Walsh; and Donald Pearce, a classmate of Ken’s from the University of Western Ontario, who was also now a U of M grad student (as were Hayden and Walsh).

The great young English poet W. H. Auden, who was teaching at Michigan in the early ’40s, came for dinner to the Millars’ small rented cottage (actually a converted garage). “And he brought (his companion) Chester (Kallman) to meet us,” Margaret remembered nearly fifty years later. “Our (four-year-old) daughter took a great dislike to (Auden’s) voice; he had a curious sort of voice... He read one of my books, and he thought it was terrific. He laughed himself sick about this certain scene I’d written, in Wall of Eyes. I was, of course, flattered.”

The critic Cleanth Brooks was also teaching at Michigan in the early ’40s; he too came to dinner at the Millars’.

Evenings at Ken and Maggie’s place could be fun occasions; Margaret sometimes played the piano, and Kenneth in those years could be almost raucously convivial. But the Millars were also difficult friends to have and keep: each of them intense, opinionated, frequently scoffing.

“I think I was always a little bit afraid of her,” Anna Branson said of Margaret. “Because, let’s put it this way: she called a spade a spade, and in no uncertain terms.”

Ken also had his problematic side, said Anna Branson: “They were both great hands for explaining things through psychology — oh, great hands!... I was complaining about this forty-dollar bill for some drugs I had to take; I said, ‘You know, I forgot to pay it!’ And so Ken, very gravely, said: ‘That’s because you didn’t want to pay it.’ See? There was always a little... explanation... something that happened, that made me do whatever I did... I mean, I got to the point where I just thought, ‘Well I’m just gonna be careful what I say.’”

It seemed the people Kenneth and Margaret were most at ease with were one another (not that they didn’t fight). But not long after selling his first novel, Ken Millar took a step that would separate him from Maggie for a significant period: in 1944, he got a commission in the United States Naval Reserve.

In the autumn of ’44, Ken Millar went to Princeton for training, then to Harvard. He was at Harvard when The Dark Tunnel was published, to more-than-respectable reviews. In early 1945, he was posted to the Eleventh Naval District in San Diego, California. Margaret, with their daughter Linda, accompanied Ken there (as she’d followed him to Princeton and Boston). Ensign Kenneth Millar was assigned to duty as a communications officer aboard the USS Shipley Bay.

Part of the idea of Ken’s joining the Navy was to ease him out of the academic life, with which he’d grown disenchanted, and into a career as a full-time writer. Margaret had inspired him. She’d also outpaced him, and would soon have even greater success.

Margaret Millar had followed the well-received Wall of Eyes with another farcical nonseries mystery, Fire Will Freeze. But her next book was another serious murder story with Inspector Sands: The Iron Gates.

Random House had high hopes for this one, which they presented as “a psychological thriller” to differentiate it from more run-of-the-mill mysteries. It was published while Ken Millar was at sea aboard the Shipley Bay, and its reviews were spectacular. Dorothy B. Hughes (herself a noted suspense novelist) called it “a fine cut, flawless gem... one of the finest psychological mysteries of all time... (and a book that) stands equal with those few studies of murder which reach the status of literature.”

The Iron Gates sold into a third printing — and, thanks to the Ober Agency’s West Coast rep H. N. Swanson, it sold to Warner Bros., who bought movie rights for fifteen thousand dollars and hired Margaret Millar to write a screenplay of her book at seven hundred fifty dollars a week.

These were enormous sums for the cash-strapped Millars, who one recent winter had borrowed money to buy Christmas presents for their little girl, and had burned packing crates in the fireplace for heat. Now, Maggie wrote Ken, half an ocean away: “when you get out of the navy, you won’t have to go job-hunting or asskissing or nothing. You’ll just come home & we’ll write.”

Margaret had fallen in love with Southern California. Even before her movie sale, she’d bought a modest house (with Iron Gates book-money) in the beautiful oceanside city of Santa Barbara, ninety miles north of Los Angeles.

Hollywood, though, was another matter. Although Maggie liked the other Warners writers she met during her studio stint (who included William Faulkner, John Collier, Jo Pagano, W.R. Burnett, and Elliot Paul), she didn’t approve of the movietown’s loose moral climate. (“I’m very square,” she said later. “The Hollywood life didn’t appeal to me.”) And she wasn’t keen on how her script was subjected to the judgment of unqualified others.

“I like writing dialogue,” she said in 1990, “but I don’t like other people to come in and interfere. I don’t like people asking the charwoman, ‘What do you think of this?’ If they ask a jury of my peers, then—”

The screenplay Maggie wrote all on her own pleased everyone at Warners, from producer Henry Blanke to the head of the studio. “The last I saw of it,” Margaret remembered of her Iron Gates adaptation, “Jack Warner had read it and — this is something I’ll never forget — he wrote across the front of it: DO IT NOW. And then they offered it to Bette Davis. She turned it down, because the woman (character) dies three-fourths of the way through. She thought I could rewrite it, to let her live to the bitter end — and have a big scene then, you know. And then it went to Barbara Stanwyck; and she turned it down, for the same reason. By that time, I couldn’t care less. I was already writing something else: my own books... I’m a worker. I’m a serious writer. And all this folderol was — junk.”

Ensign Millar, on leave, got to visit his wife at Warners and meet William Faulkner and the other writers; he was at the studio on August 14, 1945: the day Japan surrendered and World War II came to an end.

Another memorable event, one even more momentous in terms of the Millars’ subsequent careers, took place during a later leave, when Maggie rendezvoused with Ken in San Francisco. On an October night in 1945 (in a week when the issue of Liberty magazine including a condensation of The Iron Gates was on newsstands), Kenneth and Margaret Millar got together for the first time with mystery reviewer and writer Anthony Boucher, for several hours of drinks and enthusiastic conversation. Boucher, already an important genre critic and soon to be crime-fiction reviewer for the New York Times, was a fan of both Margaret’s and Kenneth’s work. (“He often said it was amazing,” his widow Phyllis White remembered, “to find so much talent in one family.”)

Anthony Boucher reminded the Millars of the short-story contest now being held by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the first in what would become an annual competition. The critic urged both Ken and Margaret to enter. Ken took the suggestion to heart. On returning to his ship the next day, he got right to work and wrote two short stories featuring a Los Angeles detective called Joe Rogers, a private eye who bore a passing resemblance to Raymond Chandler’s popular hard-boiled hero Philip Marlowe. (Eventually, Millar/Macdonald would rename his Rogers character Lew Archer and use him as the narrator-protagonist in a long series of novels, starting with 1949’s The Moving Target.) Ken mailed these two stories to Margaret, who had the Ober Agency submit them to the EQMM contest.

Maggie too wrote an entry for the competition, an eighteen-page tale entitled “The Zombie.”

“It sounds like the sort of thing that could cop a prize by originality and good writing,” Ken commented on Margaret’s written description of her contest story (unlocated, in 2004). Could this be the all-dialogue item Margaret Millar years later told writer Ed Gorman she’d once done? (“(Y)ou carry that (all-dialogue, no-prose idea) too far and then it doesn’t work either. I did it with a short story once. It was a disaster.”) In any case, Ken Millar was inspired to write an all-dialogue story himself, “Shock,” which he also entered in the EQMM competition. (“Shock” was printed eight years later, as “Shock Treatment,” in the debut issue of Manhunt.)

“The Zombie” didn’t snag an award, but one of Ken’s stories did. Ellery Queen named “Find the Woman” a fourth-prize winner and published it in an issue of EQMM and in a subsequent book-collection.

It would be several years before Margaret and Ken Millar both entered stories again in the same competition. Then the results would be rather different. By then too there would be many other changes in their lives.

Many writers who found a formula for a significant success would seize and use it as the template for an entire career, working the same trick over and over. But that wasn’t Margaret Millar’s way. She never stood still in her work. Her follow-up to the moneymaking Inspector Sands “psychological thriller” The Iron Gates was a semi-mainstream 1947 novel, Experiment In Springtime, with some suspense elements but no Inspector Sands. After that, Margaret wrote the completely nonmysterious It’s All in the Family, a charming but plotless collection of vignettes involving a precocious twelve-year-old named Priscilla, which, like “Grandpa and the Weather,” romanticized Margaret’s own childhood (this time in the third person).

It’s All in the Family became a minor bestseller in 1948 and was excerpted in Ladies’ Home Journal. The author followed it up not with a similar work evoking the joys of childhood but with The Cannibal Heart, a novel of modem menace, featuring a troubled married couple and their endangered eight-year-old daughter. This was succeeded by another change of pace, Do Evil in Return, billed as “Mrs. Millar’s first mystery novel since The Iron Gates.”

Readers (and publishers) never knew what to expect from Margaret Millar — and neither did the author. Her imagination didn’t run to formula. Never again, for instance, would she write a book that involved Inspector Sands.

Her husband encouraged Margaret’s explorations and innovations; but he needed to tailor his own output (and income) to accommodate her creativity. After writing three more postwar thrillers under his own name — and trying, and failing, to write a mainstream novel about his own more troubled Kitchener adolescence — Ken Millar resurrected the private eye from his prize-winning 1945 short story, called him Lew Archer, and starred him in The Moving Target, a 1949 pseudonym-signed “bread-and-butter mystery” whose modest success encouraged Millar/Macdonald to continue writing Archer novels for what would turn out to be the rest of his life.

“He wasn’t indifferent to sales, by any means,” said Collin Wilcox, a mystery writer who became friends with Ross Macdonald in the 1960s. “I was moaning one time about, ‘Geez, I haven’t got a real good paperback deal.’ He said, ‘Well it’s the same with Margaret: she didn’t give a damn, she just writes what she feels like writing and — you know, the hell with ’em!’ And so he said it was sorta up to him to, you know, bring home the bacon! And he recognized that a series was the way to go.”

If Margaret’s writing was unpredictable, her output remained consistent; it had to.

“One thing he did tell me,” recalled Hugh Kenner, the Canadian academic and critic who knew the Millars in Santa Barbara in the 1950s, “was that the economics of mystery writing really required that you produce two books a year. And between them, they could do that... So that collaboration of theirs was what kept them in very good circumstances.”

Or, as Margaret would put it: “No writee, no eatee.”

Working at opposite ends of the house and at different times of the day, Kenneth and Margaret Millar maintained their professional pace for decades.

“I think things would have been very different for both Ken and me had there not been a Depression and had we not been (raised during it),” Margaret said in 1990. “But then, maybe we wouldn’t have worked so hard all our lives. Because we never took a day off. Sundays — Christmas — nothing. We just worked.” And, though their writing styles differed, their respect for one another’s work was mutual and undiminished.

“(Ken) used to envy — he did, to me — Margaret’s writing,” said Donald Pearce, a friend of the Millars’ for thirty years. “And he said of her that she was a natural writer, as compared to himself. And he instanced an example of it; he said, ‘’Frinstance,’ he recited to me a sentence with a simile in it: ‘Her question trailed off into the room like a faint cigarette track in the air,’ or something like that... The comparison between the question and the... smoke trailing off, was so perfect... The ear is so fine, and the tuning is so good there, that it is a successful piece of writing.”

“I know that Ken said that Margaret could write better than he could,” agreed Lydia Freeman, another friend of the Millars’ throughout the 1950s and ’60s.

Margaret was equally appreciative of Kenneth’s work. “I remember running into (author) Glenway Westcott I think, at some station or other,” she said years later. “He said, ‘You know, I think your husband’s a better writer than you are.’ And I said, ‘I agree — absolutely.’ And I did agree, and I was very very happy about it. (Ken was simply embarrassed.)”

Mystery writer William Campbell Gault bumped up against Margaret’s high opinion of her husband’s prose when he first encountered the Millars at a party in San Diego in the early 1950s. Ticked off by Ken’s opening remark to him, Gault recalled responding: “‘Are you Ken Millar?... I’ll tell you something... your wife writes better than you do.’ I thought she did. Maggie’s in the toilet and overhears me. When she comes out, she says, ‘Some little son of a bitch out there says I write better than Ken!’”

“They were a great mutual admiration society,” Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin said of the Millars, whom he met several times during the 1960s and ’70s. “They both liked each other’s work a whole lot, which I thought was interesting — perhaps more from her direction than from his.”

“Of course the thought you always had with Margaret and Ken was: who was the dominant personality?” said Claire Stump, another friend of the Millars’ in the ’50s and ’60s. “And in a way, you kinda felt that Margaret was. But Margaret kind of felt that people thought she was stronger but she really wasn’t, that Ken was. So maybe they each found strength in each other.

“But I would say that Ken would be inclined to... acquiesce to Margaret’s wishes; at least, that was my feeling.”

Saul David, an editor at Bantam Books, cast his professionally curious eye on the Millars when he visited them in Santa Barbara in the 1950s, during a brief period when Ken and Margaret were both being published in paperback by Bantam. “As I remember it, she was sort of the head of the household, or so it would seem,” David said. “But not like a Hollywood head of the household; I mean, there was nothing driven about it. It was very easy, familial... I was interested in the way they worked. She advised him on his books; she used to criticize and advise. Ken was a very gentle kind of guy, very soft-spoken. Maggie was really rather more the pro than he was; she was very well-established. But they were so different. And (their books were) so different, that it made a very interesting contrast.”

“If I wanted him to, he was eager to read (my manuscripts),” Margaret Millar said after her husband’s death. “But... we both liked to go our own way; and then if we goofed, go back and correct. But I think if you’re really born to be a writer — and I think both of us were — you sort of know when you’re goofing.

“We used to call it ‘the one-third blues’ and ‘the two-third blues.’ If you were lucky, you got to two-thirds before you got the feeling that, ‘Geez, this is terrible! How did I get stuck with this ghastly plot? What am I gonna do?’ And then I might ask Ken to read it. And he might ask me to read his.

“And you got out of it, someways, always. Maybe that’s the whole secret of writing mysteries: paint yourself into a corner, and then get yourself out.”

Short stories were engaging Margaret Millar’s originality often in 1954, a year which saw publication of three of her efforts in the form.

First of this trio in print was “Wimbi’s Wedding Dress,” a Woman’s Day story involving an American woman botanist and a young Witoto Indian girl in the Brazilian jungle. Margaret, who’d never been near Brazil, was inspired to write it after reading an article in the National Geographic.

Of more likely interest to Margaret’s usual readers was “McGowney’s Miracle,” a chilling tale which her husband thought “a humdinger.” First published in Cosmopolitan, “McGowney’s Miracle” combined suspense, horror, and black comedy in a concise manner which was becoming a hallmark of Margaret Millar’s work. “McGowney’s Miracle” would be anthologized many times over the years. Prolific mystery short-story writer Edward D. Hoch would call it “a gem of a story.”

Margaret’s third short tale of 1954 was written for the ninth annual Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine contest. Although both Ken and Maggie had entered the original EQMM competition in 1945, Margaret’s entry then had not been officially acknowledged, allowing the Millars now to claim disingenuously this was the first time they’d both submitted stories in the same year.

In any case, John Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer adventure, “Wild Goose Chase,” took a third prize — and Margaret trumped him with her second-prize winner, “The Couple Next Door.” This was a classic story of detection with a twist; and its detective was none other than Margaret’s old fictional friend Inspector Sands, not encountered by readers since her 1945 book The Iron Gates (and never to be met again). The Toronto police detective was retired now; in his post-police years, he’d made his home (like the Millars) in Southern California.

“The Couple Next Door” was a notable effort. With it, Margaret Millar abandoned the short-story form for several years. She had bigger fish to fry.

The most artistically important period of Margaret Millar’s writing career, it could be argued, were the seven years between 1955 and 1962. In that productive span, she wrote five novels: one of which won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award, the next of which was published while she served as president of the MWA, and the final three which readers and fellow writers admire for the craft with which they conceal and reveal their plots’ solutions. Of this last trio, the accomplished Edward D. Hoch would write: “they are, in a special sense, the peak of the mystery writers’ art.”

Beast in View, Margaret’s Edgar-winner, limned with memorable intensity the behavior of an emotionally disturbed woman. The story grew out of Maggie’s longstanding interest in abnormal psychology, including the Beauchamps case: the first documented instance of schizophrenia in America.

As commentators have noted, elements of Beast in View’s innovative structure have since been used in several other stories, somewhat diminishing the book’s surprise. In fact, a Gore Vidal TV play the author saw while writing Beast in View seemed so close to her book’s intentions that she was ready to scrap her work-in-progress before it was even finished. Her husband, though, suggested a final twist that salvaged the novel and made it even more effective. “He saved the book,” she wrote in 1983, “from becoming what would have been by this time a cliché.”

Beast in View was bought for condensation by Cosmopolitan. The author elected to do her own abridgment. “You could either do it yourself,” she recalled, “or have one of the editors do it. Well — some choice.” Maggie enjoyed reshaping her own text. “It’s difficult to cut a book down to 25,000 words, unless you really know how to do it. And it just came natural to me.” So much so, she was sometimes able to work variations on her original work, as she indicated to critic James Sandoe regarding her Beast in View job.

Given her active participation, the abridgments Margaret made of her novels might almost be considered part other short-fiction oeuvre. Other books she condensed for Cosmo were An Air That Kills (which the magazine called “The Soft Talkers,” the book’s UK title) and The Listening Walls (“Listening Walls”).

Several Ross Macdonald books were also bought by Cosmo, and Margaret Millar tutored Ken in doing their abridgments. At first, she said, “Ken would go through, and he’d look laboriously... thinking he could spare that deft line, spare this one — you can’t do that; you have to cut out the whole shebang. You know. And then, when he learned it, he became very proficient at cutting his own work.”

At the time the Edgar Allan Poe Award was being given to Beast in View, its author and her family were undergoing a terrible series of events relating to the Millars’ sixteen-year-old daughter: Linda Millar was involved in a fatal hit-and-run automobile accident in Santa Barbara. After months of frontpage publicity, Linda admitted responsibility for the incident and was sentenced to eight years’ probation. In the wake of this calamity, the Millars moved to Northern California for a year. Kenneth and Margaret returned to Santa Barbara in late 1957.

Margaret Millar nonetheless kept writing. In 1957, she published An Air That Kills, a book some reviewers thought nearly as good as Beast in View; and her colleagues elected her president of the Mystery Writers of America.

Maggie went to New York that year to officiate at the Edgar Awards dinner at Toots Shor’s. There she had the singular pleasure of calling upon in public a crucial figure from her past whom she’d never met in person.

After telling her Edgar-dinner audience the “Cinderella story” of how the head of Doubleday’s mystery unit sent her a telegram in 1940 accepting her first book for publication (she omitted mention of Wall of Eyes’ later rejection), President Millar announced from the rostrum: “I understand that the editor who sent that telegram is in the audience tonight. Will Mrs. Isabelle Taylor of the Crime Club please stand up?”

The Millars endured another family crisis in 1959, when daughter Linda disappeared for ten days while attending college at UC Davis. She was found in Reno, Nevada, and eventually resumed studies at UCLA.

Also in 1959, Margaret Millar published The Listening Walls, the first of what Edward D. Hoch would call her “special trio of novels,” each of which “withholds the key element of its solution until the very end of the book.” It was followed in 1960 by A Stranger in My Grave and in 1962 by How Like an Angel.

“Just as the success of her early novels helped launch her husband, Kenneth Millar (Ross Macdonald), on his career as a mystery writer,” Ed Hoch wrote, “there is some evidence in A Stranger in My Grave and her following novel that she has been influenced by the California tradition of sleuths like Lew Archer,” in that the answer to these mysteries “lies in the past, in tangled family relationships.”

Few families’ relationships had seemed more tangled than the Millars’ own. In 1962, with her daughter Linda newly and happily married, Margaret Millar wrote a remarkable short story which seemed to deal, at least symbolically, with some of the events and issues of her only child’s earlier years.

Children of writers may have special problems. Linda Jane Millar suffered a number of them.

As a youngster of seven or eight years old, in postwar Santa Barbara, Linda Millar had trouble fitting into (or not intruding on) her parents’ routines. Mother and father both worked at home, and each needed privacy. Where was Linda supposed to be? For a while, she attached herself to the family of a postman living nearby.

As Linda grew older, her parents’ brilliance intimidated her. At the same time, all three Millars were isolated — by work, by intellect, by choice — from the community. At school, Linda was too brainy and odd to be accepted by the popular crowd. Often the friends she found were reckless ones.

Linda Jane was a source of inspiration for her writer-parents, especially Margaret, several of whose books included smart, willful, emotional little girls who resembled her own. After Linda’s awful troubles (her fatal car accident, her disappearance), Margaret Millar and Ross Macdonald each used fiction to explore and perhaps exorcise family patterns that may have contributed to Linda’s fate.

In Margaret Millar’s story “The People Across the Canyon,” we meet Paul and Marion Borton, a couple not unlike Ken and Margaret Millar. The Bortons’ eight-year-old only child Cathy seems to have picked up many ways and moods from the Millars’ blue-eyed Linda. Like the Millars, the Bortons cherish their privacy — for which their daughter pays a steep price.

As Linda once did, Cathy becomes attached to another family in the neighborhood: the blandly-named, romantic-seeming Smiths, who seem much happier and more exciting to Cathy than her own bristly parents. The lonely eight-year-old’s wistful claim about her plans with the Smiths seems heartbreaking: “I’m going away with them to dance and play baseball.”

“The People Across the Canyon” shifts point of view several times in the course of its pages: from the watchful, wary mother’s; to the cautious, knowing child’s; to the cheery but discouraged teacher’s. The tale too switches mood and shape: Is it a mystery? A ghost story? A fantasy? Or some sort of muted modem tragedy?

However labeled, Margaret Millar’s short work was haunting, at once poignant and chilling. It seemed worthy of keeping company with the fables of any number of notable contemporaries, from Ray Bradbury to Shirley Jackson to John Cheever.

The Ober agents did their best to place this special story somewhere outside Margaret’s usual markets; they sent “The People Across the Canyon” in early 1961 to The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, Hudson Review, Ladies’ Home Journal, Mademoiselle, McCall’s, The New Yorker, Redbook, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Woman’s Day. In the end, though, it was only Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine who wanted it. Maggie the pro was happy to give it to them, for two hundred and fifty dollars.

Margaret Millar’s nineteenth novel, The Fiend, was published in 1964. Its jacket copy (probably written, as was most of Margaret’s bookflap text throughout her career, by Kenneth) called the book “simple and shocking... a searching and scathing inquiry into the guilty relations of adults with children.” In 1976, Ross Macdonald named The Fiend one of his three favorite books by his wife (the other two being Beast in View and A Stranger in My Grave.)

Her twentieth work, which took four years to research and write, was Margaret Millar’s most surprising effort yet, in a career of surprises that delighted her husband and kept readers and publishers alert: The Birds and the Beasts Were There, a nonfiction account of Maggie’s birdwatching activities in and around Santa Barbara.

The book was charming, fascinating, humorous, informative, and beautifully-paced. Its centerpiece, a vivid account of a huge wildfire that menaced much of Santa Barbara (including the Millars’ house) in 1964, was as gripping and suspenseful as a Margaret Millar novel. An excerpt from this book was printed in (of all surprising places) Sports Illustrated.

Margaret Millar returned to fiction in 1970 with Beyond This Point Are Monsters.

Then, late in 1970, the Millars’ only child Linda died, at the age of thirty-one. It was the heaviest of blows. Margaret, who’d kept writing all during her daughter’s adolescent crises, now put down her pen, she said for good.

It was in these years that Margaret Millar the writer slipped most into the shade of her husband Ross Macdonald, who’d become a bestselling author in 1969 with his fifteenth Lew Archer novel, The Goodbye Look.

“I hope she comes back to writing eventually,” Ken Millar wrote Julian Symons late in 1974, “but at the present time she’s just beginning to read again.” In early 1975, Kenneth told their young friend William J. Ruehlmann: “Margaret is well and active but not working. She claims she’s had her say. But I kind of wish a book would overtake her.”

But then, in a move no more surprising than many others in her career, Margaret Millar began writing again — gripped, she said, by a plot that wouldn’t let her go.

The result was Ask for Me Tomorrow, a 1976 novel which reviewers and faithful readers were most happy to greet. It featured as investigator a Hispanic lawyer named Tom Aragon, who returned in the more lighthearted 1979 book The Murder of Miranda and once more in Mermaid (1982). “Reports of my retirement,” Maggie sometimes inscribed her new books, “have been greatly exaggerated, mostly by me.”

By 1980, though, Ken Millar was showing symptoms of what was later diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease. (The last Ross Macdonald novel, The Blue Hammer, was published in 1976.) Margaret meanwhile was experiencing the onset of macular degeneration. After caring for Kenneth at home as long as she was able, a legally-blind Maggie Millar had her husband moved into a private rest home in December 1982.

In April of 1983, the Mystery Writers of America gave Margaret Millar its Grand Master Award. “I don’t know whether I deserve this award,” she said at the Edgar dinner in New York, “but I do know I worked like hell for forty-three years to get it. I wish my husband were here with me right now.”

Ken Millar died three months later, at the age of sixty-seven.

And later that year, Margaret Millar published another book: Banshee. Her final completed novel, Spider Webs, was printed in 1986.

The year after that brought one last Margaret Millar short story, “Notions”: an almost Zen-koan tale about love and loss that might be read as a sort of private p.s. to the most enduring relationship in its author’s life. “Notions” was published by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in December: the birth-month of Kenneth Millar.

Margaret Millar was seventy-nine when she died in 1994.

A decade after her death, all but a few of her books were out of print in America (though many were republished regularly in Europe). It seemed as if her entire life’s work might, like the work of so many other past masters, be almost completely forgotten in her own adopted country.

Yet why shouldn’t Margaret Millar’s career, so full of surprising plot twists, yield a final surprise in the form of a posthumous revival? Why couldn’t readers — weary of grisly forensics, o.d.’ed on books stuffed with what Maggie called “padding,” hungry for inventive stories of ageless dilemmas — once more discover the unique novels of (to quote critic Marilyn Stasio) this “subtle and... genuinely original writer”?

In the last words of Margaret Millar’s last story: “It was a lovely notion.”

Notes

“to hard-boiled master Raymond Chandler”: In the spring of 1949 (two days after writing a letter to reviewer James Sandoe critical of Macdonald’s debut novel The Moving Target), Chandler wrote another correspondent he thought the most intriguing character in mystery fiction might be the night-club master of ceremonies in Margaret Millar’s Wall of Eyes.

“It was said that Truman Capote”: “Interview with Margaret Millar,” Diana Cooper-Clark, Designs of Darkness (Popular Press, 1983)

“once or twice, they did just that”: Mystery expert Marvin Lachman has noted (“The American Regional Mystery: Southern California,” The Armchair Detective, October 1977) the parallels between Margaret Millar’s How Like an Angel (1962) and Ross Macdonald’s The Moving Target (1949): “Though similar in bare-bones outline, the books are distinctive and both excellent.”

“Somerset Maugham was a favorite author”: “I think the most influential writer in my life was Somerset Maugham,” Margaret Millar told Ed Gorman (Mystery Scene, May 1989), “who didn’t have anything whatsoever to do with mysteries except if you reread his best stories, they all had a kind of mystery plot to them. Not in wondering who did it, but in wondering what happened. He’s the best in short stories... Ever since I found out what a terrible son of a bitch he was I’ve tried not to think so highly of him but, that’s separate, that’s quite separate.”

“‘I’ve been an avid reader of mysteries since the age of eight’”: World Authors 1950–1970, edited by John Wakeman (H.W. Wilson, 1975).

“‘Yes, he was serious’”: Margaret Millar to TN. Unless otherwise indicated, all MM quotes are from interviews with TN.

“‘I got pregnant three months after we were married’”: Sally Ogle Davis, “Murder, fatalistic humor and a three-Edgar family,” Toronto Globe and Mail, July 16,1983.

“‘I think the greatest satisfaction of being a teacher’”: Kenneth Millar interview with Arthur Kaye, The Kenneth Millar Papers, Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries.

“‘an imaginary heart ailment’”: Wakeman, ibid.

“‘One day I was reading one of these’”: “The Writing Life,” Canadian Author & Bookman, Fall 1988.

“‘a mystery find of considerable voltage’”: “Mystery and Adventure,” New York Herald Tribune Books, July 20,1941.

“‘a humdinger’”: “Mystery and Adventure,” New York Herald Tribune Books, February 22, 1942.

“‘Princeton... was named after me.’”: And the bibulous John Ross Prince may have been named after Margaret Millar’s youngest brother Ross.

When Ken Millar’s first pseudonym “John Macdonald” (his own father’s first and middle names) drew a complaint from the young writer John D. MacDonald, Millar changed it for a time to John Ross Macdonald; then eventually to Ross Macdonald.

“‘Mind Over Murder’ found a home in Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine”: The novelette was later reprinted in the 1943 edition of All Fiction Detective Stories.

“Honesty is practically the whole thing in writing”: Kenneth Millar to Margaret Millar, K Millar Papers, UCI.

“Grandpa and the Weather”: Woman’s Day, March 1943.

“‘I think I was always a little bit afraid of her’”: Anna Branson to TN.

“a fine cut, flawless gem”: Albuquerque, N.M. Tribune, May 11, 1945.

“‘when you get out of the navy’”: Margaret to Kenneth Millar, February 25, 1945, The Margaret Millar Papers, Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries.

“the issue of Liberty magazine”: October 13, 1945. The magazine reported erroneously that the novel would soon become a movie “with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart.”

“‘He often said it was amazing’”: Phyllis White to TN, May 31, 1990.

“‘It sounds like the sort of thing that could cop a prize’”: Kenneth to Margaret Millar, November 4, 1945, K Millar Papers, UCI.

“‘(Y)ou carry that (all-dialogue, no-prose idea) too far’”: Gorman, ibid.

“excerpted in Ladies’ Home Journal”: May 1948.

“‘He wasn’t indifferent to sales’”: Collin Wilcox to TN.

“‘One thing he did tell me’”: Hugh Kenner to TN.

“‘(Ken) used to envy’”: Donald Pearce to TN.

“Her question trailed off into the room like a faint cigarette track in the air”: Or perhaps (from An Air That Kills (Random House, 1957)): “He gave her a cigarette and lit it for her. The smoke curled up from her mouth in a quiet smile.”

“‘I know that Ken said’”: Lydia Freeman to TN.

“‘Are you Ken Millar?’”: William Campbell Gault to TN.

“‘They were a great mutual admiration society’”: Charles Champlin to TN.

“‘Of course the thought you always had’”: Claire Stump to TN.

“‘As I remember it’”: Saul David to TN.

“a Woman’s Day story”: Woman’s Day, January 1954.

“For my own part”: Margaret Millar to James Sandoe, May 7, 1955, The James Sandoe Collection, MSS 317, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.

“‘they are, in a special sense, the peak of the mystery writers’ art’”: Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, editor John M. Reilly (St. Martin’s Press, 1980).

“‘He saved the book’”: Afterword, Beast in View reissue (International Polygonics, Ltd., 1983).

“‘I understand that the editor who sent that telegram’”: The Third Degree (MWA newsletter), April 1957.

“special trio of novels”: Crime and Mystery Writers, ibid.

“In 1976, Ross Macdonald named The Fiend”: Macdonald interviews with Paul Nelson, UCI.

“(of all surprising places) Sports Illustrated”: “A Career of Spying,” April 15, 1978.

“I hope she comes back to writing eventually”: Ken Millar letter to Julian Symons, September 10, 1974; copy sent by JS to TN.

“Margaret is well and active but not working”: Ken Millar letter to William Ruehlmann, January 31, 1975; typed copy, UCI.

“‘I don’t know whether I deserve this award’”: The Third Degree, June/July 1983.

“‘subtle and... genuinely original writer’”: “A Sweep Through the Subgenres,” The Sleuth and the Scholar: Origins, Evolution, and Current Trends in Detective Fiction, edited by Barbara A. Rader and Howard G. Zettler (Greenwood Press, 1988).