ROSS MACDONALD and MARGARET MILLAR
Ross Macdonald was the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar (December 13, 1915 - July 11, 1983), California-born, Canada-raised, eventually returning to California to work hard and slowly to become a preeminent mystery/detective novelist so good, so accomplished that he is now considered a significant voice in 20th Century American literature. Although influenced by the great detective writers in the generation before him, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Macdonald forged a style of his own out of the postwar pulps. His awareness and sophisticated understanding of literary history and tropes (he had a doctorate in literature) and his interest in psychology provided a firm foundation for his use of the detective form to investigate human relationships, conflicts, and tragedies. He wrote stand-alone novels (we have three here), but his great and lasting creation was Lew Archer, a man whose perspective and voice sustains the reader through 18 novels and many short stories. Macdonald is also a keen observer of Californian (and American) culture, documenting in good style a time and place and people.
His wife, Margaret Millar (1915-1994), wrote many fine novels of psychological suspense, and I include her work here as a measure of their marriage, their partnership, and their mutual influence. Of interest also is Macdonald’s deep friendship with Eudora Welty, another master of a region and a people. A volume of their letters is included here.
Collected Millar: The Master at Her Zenith: Vanish in an Instant; Wives and Lovers; Beast in View; An Air That Kills; The Listening Walls
Collected Millar: The Master at Her Zenith: Vanish in an Instant; Wives and Lovers; Beast in View; An Air That Kills; The Listening Walls
Five acclaimed novels from the Golden Age of Suspense, including the Edgar Award-Winning Novel Beast in View
Introduction by Tom Nolan
In 1950s America the men are back to work and the women are home raising a new generation. The war is over and the boom is on. Everyone is happy. It is to this myth of the perfect American family that novelist Margaret Millar applied her scalpel.
This volume includes five of Millar’s novels of the 1950s, among her best-known works of literary suspense as well as some of the most compulsively readable, please-leave-a-light-on thrillers ever put to paper.
VANISH IN AN INSTANT (1952)
In this classic noir tale of blurred guilt and flawed innocence, a cynical lawyer uncovers the desperate lives of a group connected only by a gruesome murder.
WIVES AND LOVERS (1954)
A sincere and compassionate novel about the complications of married life, and the love, loathing, pain, loyalty, disappointments and friendship that grow out of a marriage.
BEAST IN VIEW (1955) – Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel
Hailed as one of the greatest psychological mysteries ever written and winner of the 1956 Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Novel, Beast in View remains as freshly sinister today as the day it was first published.
AN AIR THAT KILLS (1957)
When Ron Galloway never arrives at a boys' weekend fishing retreat, it becomes increasingly clear that something terrible has befallen him. Was he a victim of his own lust? Or of someone else's greed?
THE LISTENING WALLS (1959)
In this suspenseful masterpiece about corrupted love, Rupert Kellogg's wife, Amy, goes missing after an ill-fated trip to Mexico—and Rupert becomes the focus of a paranoid investigation.