The Couple Next Door: Collected Short Mysteries

“My life is remarkable only for its omissions,” Margaret Millar claimed to the Wilson Library Bulletin in 1946. “I have never broken a limb, been divorced or arrested, never had anything stolen, and the only thing I ever lost was a phonograph needle.”

The author was being modest — and a bit disingenuous. Even by 1946, her professional and personal lives were full of remarkable things.

Maggie Millar, as a storyteller or an autobiographer, was adept at using prose to conceal as well as reveal. Her spare and elegant sentences told only what she let them.

Such was the case in 1950, when she sketched this self-portrait for the Unicorn Mystery Book Club News. Her charming account of her life-to-date was accurate as far as it went; but an equally “truthful” and darker silhouette of the author emerged between the lines of her novels, works populated with anxious and neurotic characters who were anything but unremarkable. Her tenth volume, Do Evil in Return, prompted this stylish self-assessment.

Notes

“‘My life is remarkable only for its omissions’”: Miriam Allen Deford, “Margaret Millar,” Wilson Library Bulletin, Volume 21, Number 4, December 1946.

“this stylish self-assessment”: Margaret Millar, “About the Author: Margaret Millar,” Unicorn Mystery Book Club News, Volume 3, number 3, 1950.

Do Evil in Return was the second Margaret Millar title to be chosen as a Unicorn selection. The very first Unicorn volume, in 1945, included her book The Iron Gates.

About the Author: Margaret Millar

When, at the age of four, I fell over a twenty-foot banister and landed on my feet unhurt, my mother decided that I must be a genius. She wasn’t sure what I was a genius at, however, so I was forced to play the field. During the next ten years I did monologues, imitations, readings; played the clarinet; danced in amateur reviews; sang in a choir, contralto, tenor, or soprano, wherever sheer volume was needed. I went from choir to choir as utility infielder. But it was the piano that led me, in a backhanded way, into writing.

After playing at banquets, dancing classes and funerals for considerable time, I persuaded the manager of the local radio station to let me have a program of my own. In a few weeks it became painfully clear that no fan mail was forthcoming unless I wrote it myself. This required intense cunning, since the manager possessed a suspicious nature. Not only was a change of handwriting, ink, and paper necessary for each letter, but I was compelled to develop various styles of writing to fit the various characters I had dreamed up. I’m still dreaming them up, and still developing various styles. I no longer write my own fan mail, though I sometimes wish I did.

Since the last war I’ve been living in Santa Barbara with my husband (or husbands: Kenneth Millar and his pseudonym, John Ross Macdonald), our sixth-grader daughter Linda, a collie, a cocker spaniel, and two female hamsters who can teach us all a lesson in serenity. We swim a great deal, ride some, go dancing when the spirit (me) moves Ken, and root fervently, though at a distance, for the Tigers and the Dodgers. Mostly, however, we just write. It seems to agree with us. Once in a while I play the piano, for old time’s sake. Mercifully, the clarinet has disappeared.

During the war, while Ken was at sea literally, I was at sea figuratively, in Hollywood, doing the script for my Iron Gates, which has yet to see film. Before that, we lived in Ann Arbor, before that in Canada. University of Toronto. Before that — but this is where I came in.