A Stranger In My Grave by Margaret Millar

The investigation then ceases to be less of the search for a 'lost day' and rather the search for the connection between Camilla and Daisy. The mystery deepens when the name on the gravestone - Carlos Camilla - means absolutely nothing to Daisy. When the two visit the cemetery they discover the grave exists exactly as described down to the unusual tree standing guard over the site. Fifteen years later Millar returned with a similar idea in A Stranger in My Grave.ĭaisy Harker dreams of visiting her own grave and hires Steve Pinata, bail bondsman and sometime private detective, to help her learn more about the date carved into the gravestone.

In the case of The Iron Gates the nightmare was an expression of a repressed guilt over a past crime and in that novel another character exploits that repression in one of the most wicked forms of revenge ever perpetrated in contemporary crime fiction. As early as her sixth novel The Iron Gates (1945), her second mystery novel set in her home province of Ontario, Canada, she was playing with the idea of dreams - more often than not nightmares - and how those subconscious images interplay with a character's waking life. No better example of Millar's triple whammy of talent can be found than in A Stranger in My Grave (1960), a mystery story that also happens to be a timely modern novel about birth origins, children and parenting.Ī Stranger in My Grave features one of Millar's favorite crime fiction metaphors - nightmares. When you combine a 'natural born' talent for crafting perfect sentences like the one above with tightly plotted stories and characters who speak dialog with unique voices and who sound like people you meet in everyday life you get an end result that is all too rare in contemporary crime fiction: real novels with real plots that both entertain the reader as mysteries and stimulate the mind with human insight and literary power. The comparison between the question and the.smoke trailing off, was so perfect the ear is so fine and the tuning so good, there.' 'F'rinstance ' - and he recited to me a sentence of hers with a simile in it: 'Her question trailed off into the room like a faint cigarette track in the air, or something like that. The famous example quoted in Tom Nolan's biography (as much a life story of the two crime writers as it is a bio of the creator of Lew Archer) goes like this: Her husband, Ross Macdonald, once confessed a deep envy of her ability as a natural born writer as well.

Margaret Millar is first and foremost a great storyteller.

A Stranger In My Grave by Margaret Millar