If the story were titled "Les Deceptions de Marie-Blanche", it might be translated as "The Disappointments of Marie-Blanche": an apt choice. San Francisco Earthquake, 1907 - Click for source details And, yet, as it stands, there is the added implication that Marie-Blanche has not only been disappointed by
Although some of the characters in the Margaret Millar mysteries I have read answer their own phones, many answer other people's phones instead: the telephones of older or more privileged relatives or those of their bosses. There's even a switchboard operator in the mix, along with a woman better known
I laid in with this story, while on a brief holiday in a small town outside Toronto. Outside, the sound of other people's everyday morning scurried past, but I was not required to be anywhere in particular that day. Salzburg Austria, Prison overlooking town [Piotr Bozyk, Click for credit]
Because so many of Margaret Millar's novels consider married couples - often at the point in which the relationship is strained, if not fractured - one wonders about her relationship with Ken Millar (better known as Ross MacDonald, who also wrote mysteries). Did they squabble like Esther and Ron do
There is, about an hour's drive from Toronto, a small town called Paris, on the Grand River. I've visited it a couple of times and I have travelled through it, by train, countless times. Rarely, on one of those rail journeys, did I miss that broad curve of the tracks, the
