She Made Being Deceived a Pleasure

A few years ago, the distinguished British mystery writer and critic H.R.F Keating edited a book called “The 100 Best Books of Crime and Mystery.” Two of his choices (only Agatha Christie and Georges Simeon had three chosen) were works by Margaret Millar: “A Beast in View” (1955) and “Beyond This Point Are Monsters” (1970).

Margaret Millar, Keating wrote, “is surely one of the late 20th-Century crime fiction’s best writers, in the sense that the actual writing in her books, the prose, is of superb quality.”

So it is. Margaret Millar--Maggie to a very wide and eclectic circle of friends--died on March 26 at age 79, after long illness, leaving a legacy of some two dozen mysteries that are superior in their literary quality, the astonishing ingenuity of her plotting and the acuity of her insights to both the dark and light sides of humankind.

Never seeming to strain for an effect or an image, she wrote in “A Beast in View” of a nervous woman who looked like “a sparrow preserved in ice.” The face of a woman suddenly angry seemed “like rising dough.” And she wrote of an ill-treated servant who was “owed back wages in civility as well as cash.”

She once made a note for a story in which a young woman comes upon a tombstone bearing her name, date of birth and date of death--four years previously. Examining the idea again sometime later, Millar told herself, “Write yourself out of that one, kiddo,” and she did, very adroitly indeed, in “A Stranger in My Grave.”

In both of the novels Keating chose, the dark secrets of deeply disturbed psyches are carefully concealed until the very last stunning paragraphs. She had a magician’s gift for misdirection, but she played fair and told no literary lies. Her books make being deceived a rare pleasure.

Millar’s books are entertainments, but they are placed in a precisely observed and described world, most often Santa Barbara and Southern California generally. And she is no less convincing about the inner lives of migrant farm workers than of their well-heeled but not necessarily well-adjusted employers.

Her villains are monstrous indeed, innocuous as they may seem at first glance, and they are thrown into even sharper relief because they are surrounded by (or at least brush against) characters who represent the human decencies at their best. Pure good and pure evil were not really part of her equation, although the evil is undoubtedly high octane.

Her work reveals the author. In private, Maggie Millar was funny, feisty, a wickedly keen observer of the world she lived in, a fighter for the environment and other good causes, with a well developed sense of outrage at injustices wherever she found them. And, not least, she wa uncommonly brave in the face of a siege of medical problems. Whe she lost a lung to cancer, her complaint to a reporter was that it affected her buoyancy; the first time she resumed her daily swim at the Coral Casino, she sank to the bottom.

Her husband, Ken Millar, who wrote as Ross Macdonald because she had already preempted the family name in the mystery field, once said: “Writers learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on the brokern locks...our fooprints in the wet concrete and the blowing sand.”

Maggie Millar can be imagined from her novels, which are full of clues to her intelligence, her compassion, her abiding concerns, her sly wit, her love of people and of language. The novels we have are a handsome and enduring legacy, but it is a powerful sadness to think there will be no more.