Margaret Millar Biography
(1915– ), The Invisible Worm, Beast in View, How Like an Angel, An Air That Kills
American writer, born in Canada, educated at the University of Toronto. She was married to Kenneth Millar (Ross Macdonald). During the 1940s she worked as a screenwriter and wrote a number of unmemorable novels and detective stories in some of which, including The Invisible Worm (1941), the detective is Dr Paul Prye, a whimsical psychiatrist. Beast in View (1955), however, was the first of five brilliant and unusual mystery novels, of which the last, How Like an Angel (1962), in which an ex-policeman becomes involved with the True Believers, a strange Californian religious cult, is the best. The others are An Air That Kills (1957; UK title The Soft Talkers), The Listening Walls (1959), and A Stranger in My Grave (1960). Her later books are less successful. An autobiography, The Birds and the Beasts Were There, appeared in 1968.
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Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern FictionEncyclopedia of Literature: McTeague to Nancy [Freeman] Mitford Biography