A forgotten genius of noir. The Los Angeles Review of Books
November 28th, 2013
thanks to Jake Hinkson for the link
WHENEVER A WRITER
frets about balancing her work and family, or wonders whether her new book will
finally get reviewed like a man’s, or whether it will get reviewed at all, I
think of the brilliant novelist Margaret Millar and realize — it’s always been
difficult.
Perhaps you’ve heard
of “Maggie” Millar. She’s a literary suspense author who, at the onset of World
War II, explored female characters as they battled the daily accretions of
frustrated ambition and blocked power, often while trying to keep a grip on
their own sanity. Later, in the 1960s, Maggie’s perspective expanded, and she
delved into the mores and corruptions of a stratified society that resembles
our own today. She dissected the delusions of the Golden State at a time when
the rest of the country still believed in the eternal sunshine of the Edenic
kind. The people who lived in this paradise, and lived in Millar’s fiction,
often reached far beyond their financial or moral means, playing dangerous
games that pitted loved ones against each other. Sometimes, these people
escaped the law, but they always wound up serving some sort of life sentence.
Maggie, who spent
much of her life in Santa Barbara, ranks among the best fiction writers of the
late 20th century. She was a master of character, a genius of plot twists, and
a superb stylist. It’s rare to find those three talents in one literary
package, yet, over the course of a 55-year-long career, Maggie maintained her
high standards throughout her 27 books, short stories, half a dozen
screenplays, poems, radio stories, and one touching memoir. Plus, she did it
while struggling to raise a child, keep a house, and deal with a husband who
later became more famous than she. Perhaps you’ve heard of Ken Millar. He wrote
under the pseudonym of Ross Macdonald and created the Lew Archer detective
series, which paid homage to the hard-boiled detective masters Dashiell Hammet
and Raymond Chandler, and he eventually joined them in that genre’s pantheon of
men.
Maggie was never
included in that group, which annoyed her greatly.
2 comments:
Sloppy research in the article. Robert Mitchum's movie THUNDER ROAD had nothing to do with William Campbell Gault's book of the same name.
Bill Crider is right of course about Thunder Road, but my dad did receive a tiny check for the use of his title for the movie--even though the title wasn't subject to copyright.
Wm. Gault was a great admirer of Maggie Millar's prose. He liked it better than her husband's.
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