Margaret Millar
| Margaret Millar | |
|---|---|
| Born | Margaret Ellis Sturm February 5, 1915 Kitchener, Ontario |
| Died | March 26, 1994 (aged 79) Santa Barbara, California |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | American-Canadian |
| Genre | mystery, suspense |
| Spouse | Ross Macdonald |
Margaret Ellis Millar (née Sturm) (February 5, 1915 – March 26, 1994) was an American-Canadian mystery and suspense writer.
Born in Kitchener, Ontario, she was educated at the Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate Institute and the University of Toronto. She moved to the United States after marrying Kenneth Millar (better known under the pen name Ross Macdonald). They resided for decades in the city of Santa Barbara, which was often used as a locale in her later novels under the pseudonyms of San Felice or Santa Felicia. The Millars had a daughter who died in 1970.
Millar's books are distinguished by depth of characterization. Often we are shown the rather complex interior lives of the people in her books, with issues of class, insecurity, failed ambitions, loneliness or existential isolation or paranoia often being explored. Unusual people, mild societal misfits or people who don't quite fit into their surroundings are given much interior detail. In some of the books (for example in The Iron Gates) we are given insight into what it feels like to be losing touch with reality and evolving into madness. In general, she is a writer of both expressive description and economy, often ambitious in conveying the sociological context of the stories.
Millar often delivers "surprise endings," but the details that would allow the solution of the surprise have usually been subtly included, in the best genre tradition. Her books focus on subtleties of human interaction and rich psychological detail of individual characters as much as on plot.
Millar was a pioneer in writing about the psychology of women. Even as early as the '40s and '50s, her books have a mature and matter-of-fact view of class distinctions, sexual freedom and frustration, and the ambivalence of moral codes depending on a character's economic circumstances. Read against the backdrop of Production Code-era movies of the time, they remind us that life as lived in the '40s and '50s was not as black-and-white morally as Hollywood would have us believe.
Many websites cite her as working as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers just after World War II, but no further details are given as to what she may have worked on, even on imdb.com. Around that time, Warners bought the option on her novel The Iron Gates, with its portrait of a woman descending into madness, but reportedly Bette Davis and other prominent Warner Brothers actresses ultimately turned it down because the memorable protagonist is missing for the last third of the story. The film was never produced. In the early '60s, two of her novels (Beast in View and Rose's Last Summer) were adapted for the anthology TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Thriller.
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