At a crisis in his second marriage, Ron Galloway dropped out of sight. Having said good-bye to his wife and his sons in Toronto, he started out for his hunting lodge, where he had invited some friends to spend the weekend with him. When Ron failed to appear, two of his friends, Ralph Turee and Harry Bream, took it upon themselves to investigate his disappearance. Even before his body was found, they discovered that Ron had been leading a double life. The doubleness of Ron’s life was more than matched by the doubleness of his death, and the events that followed his death. Because a beautifully controlled irony is its keynote, any further summary of the story would reveal too much, and too little. When revelation does come, to Ralph Turee and the reader, it comes with the shock and illuminative flash of a carefully laid explosion

Having heard that her first husband, B. J. Lockwood, had amassed a fortune in Mexico, and with her second husband now a helpless invalid and dying, Gilda Decker hires Tom Aragon to go to Mexico to search for Lockwood. The stated reason: Gilda wants her share of Lockwood’s money — he owes her. But as Aragon questions those who knew Lockwood, he finds the man’s past shrouded in mystery; and as the young lawyer gets closer and closer to the truth, people start dying, one by one. Only on the very last pages does he, and the reader, learn the fantastic explanation for why he was really hired. This is another strong, unusual suspense novel by the author of Beyond This Point Are Monsters

This strikingly original love story deals with the disintegration of a marriage, a breakdown which occurred against the wishes of its principals and in spite of their good intentions. Martha Pearson, the central figure, is a young woman of character, whose goodness seemed almost forbidding at times. In the midst of serious difficulties with her husband, Charles, she was resolved to be faithful to him, to make something of the partnership on which he seemed to depend so completely. Then Charles went away for a while to mend his health and for the first time in years Martha had the opportunity to assess her life. In the crisis precipitated by the return of her first lover, she found that her marriage had come very near to cutting her off from the sources of happiness. She found also that a happiness once lost can he recovered only partly and on difficult terms. Experiment in Springtime presents with mature technique the subtly dramatic interplay of three modern personalities at a turning point in their lives. The psychological accuracy and depth, the unflinching honesty, for which its author is already known are here applied to a more serious and fascinating problem than Margaret Millar has previously attempted. The result is a novel of extraordinary interest and truth. It will establish a brilliant mystery writer as one of the most promising of our younger novelists

In this book Margaret Millar returns to the wry mixture of imaginative farce and queasy horror which first won the hearts of mystery fans. It has a firm, fast plot and a rich variety of characters that are as real as they are amusing. They are presented first through the eyes of Isobel Seton, a candid and witty New Yorker who has bought skis and is riding on Sno-bus to a Sno-lodge in the wilds of Quebec in the middle of a snowstorm. Other passengers include a burlesque artist, a refugee English poet whose genius is to madness near allied, an aging divorcee who acts as his patroness, a handsome young couple who are reveling masochistically in a frustrated honeymoon, a married pair who wish somebody had frustrated their honeymoon, a precocious sophomore who is making an avocation of protecting her mild and mannerly father against the perils of sex, and a handsome young-old man who says he’s so wicked that nobody believes him until he proves it. There’s a bus-driver, too, who stops the car in the middle of nowhere, walks away into the blizzard and doesn’t come back. The account of what happens to the stranded ski-party in that decayed wilderness chateau during the mad night that follows will provide mystery fans with the kind of evening that they are fanatical about. There is Miss Rudd, the elderly owner of the place, playfully free with the shears, the bus-driver’s coat discovered under the coal, the grizzly discovery in the snowbound front yard along toward morning, and other more hair-raising adventures as the tempo rises. This is the swiftest and most entertaining of Mrs. Millar’s contributions to hairbreadth-escape literature

Margaret Millar (1915–1994) was an internationally popular author whose well-crafted and sharply-written books pioneered the subgenre of psychological suspense. In a nearly 50-year writing career — which began in her native Canada and continued in Southern California — she earned the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar and Grand Master Awards, and the enthusiasm of such discriminating readers as Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, W.H. Auden and Truman Capote. Best-known for her novels, Margaret Millar also wrote a handful of short stories, tales much admired by peers (including her husband Kenneth Millar, who used the pseudonym Ross Macdonald) but never collected in book form. Now Macdonald’s biographer Tom Nolan has gathered and introduced those stories in this volume, which includes two all-but-unknown novellas from the 1940s. Here are half-a-dozen exhibits in evidence of the case made by English author and critic H.R.F. Keating, who judged: “No woman in twentieth-century American mystery writing is more important than Margaret Millar.”

Dr. Paul Prye’s wedding was dramatically interrupted when Jane Stevens, a bridesmaid, became ill in the church vestibule. Some thought it was a convulsion. Prye knew it was poison. Jane’s brother Duncan, a smooth bully, didn’t care what it was. Duncan fancied himself as a great gentleman and a superior wit. Hence, it satisfied many people when he was found under most humiliating circumstances. With one poisoning, one bashed several hysterical women, and a most amusing inebriated divorcée, THE DEVIL LOVES ME is completely suave and subtle. The appeal of Margaret Millar’s books is compounded of plot, humor, and characterization. This particular one is tops

A first novel distinguished by its clever dialogue and amusing characterization is always something to shout about. Added to these qualities, THE INVISIBLE WORM has a very substantial plot. Dr. Paul Prye, by profession a psychiatric diagnostician, by avocation a traditional Paul Pry, preferred to be called a quack. He was a classic example of “sees and hears and tells” all. His unofficial investigation of the death of the unlamented Thomas Philips nearly drove Inspector Bailey crazy. But Dr. Prye had his points. He knew where the diamond necklace was and he had a very good idea of the origin of the hyoscine which poisoned Mr. Philips. He could recognize a colleague, even disguised with bronze fingernails and copper hair, and he saw to it that the right person finally paid the penalty for murder. Dr. Prye is as amusing a character as the Crime Club has introduced in a long time. We believe that he will be in constant demand from now on

Dr. Paul Prye, who mode his effective first appearance in The Invisible Worm, continues to annoy people and catch murderers in this present opus. Dr. Prye was threatened by Joan, a hefty blonde of eighteen, with a quick demise in the bottom of the lake if he declared her insane, but it was Joan, not Dr. Prye, whom they fished out of the lake. Joan was just one of those people who from birth seemed destined to murder at the hands of most of her acquaintances. One of the other lake shore residents was picked as the guilty party until he, too, made his exit from life via the lake. Miss Emily Bonner, the self-made arbiter of the social life of Lake Rosseau, lived behind her field glasses, so she contributed to Dr. Prye some odds and ends of irrelevant evidence of the domestic life of everyone concerned. Fundamentally Dr. Prye was a psychiatrist, and actually it was his knowledge that solved the case — not Miss Emily's long-distance snooping. To celebrate catching a murderer, he caught himself a domineering wife and had the last laugh on old Emily all at once. This is a really grand mystery story with some very funny dialogue. All in all, a fine successor to The Invisible Worm

Gordon Foster’s activities took a sudden bounce off the track of his daily pattern of staid middle-class living when a girl asked him for a match in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel. In a matter of weeks the girl Ruby followed Gordon home to Channel City and injected a somewhat discordant note into his otherwise peaceful marriage. Gordon’s wife, a fiercely virtuous woman, fought all through the hot summer to hold her husband, while most of the rest of Channel City lay prostrate under the burning coastal sun. Yet Ruby’s all but hopeless love for Gordon is paralleled by other loves, equally poignant, equally real. Mrs. Millar’s novel shows, sometimes with biting humor, sometimes with warm compassion, how extraordinary the lives and loves of those around us can be. Since her writing debut fourteen years ago, Margaret Millar has had a brilliant and variegated career as a mystery writer, as a humorist and as a serious novelist. For nearly half of those fourteen years she has been working on Wives and Lovers. It is her first major attempt to deal with the lives and loves of “ordinary” middle-class people in contemporary society