Margaret Ellis Millar (née Sturm; February 5, 1915 – March 26, 1994) was a Canadian-American mystery and suspense writer.
Born in Berlin, Ontario (the city would change its name to Kitchener in 1916), she was educated at the Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate Institute and the University of Toronto.
Often we are shown the rather complex interior lives of the people in her books, with issues of class, insecurity, failed ambitions, loneliness or existential isolation or paranoia often being explored.
Even as early as the '40s and '50s, her books have a mature and matter-of-fact view of class distinctions, sexual freedom and frustration, and the ambivalence of moral codes depending on a character's economic circumstances.
Read against the backdrop of Production Code-era movies of the time, they remind us that life as lived in the '40s and '50s was not as black-and-white morally as Hollywood would have us believe.
In the early '60s, two of her novels (Beast in View and Rose's Last Summer, the latter starred Mary Astor) were adapted for the anthology TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Thriller.
In the California years, a few books featured either Joe Quinn, a rather down-on-his-luck private eye, or Tom Aragon, a young, Hispanic lawyer.
He wrote: "Margaret Millar is surely one of late twentieth-century crime fiction's best writers, in the sense that the actual writing in her books, the prose, is of superb quality.
On almost every page of this one there is some description, whether of a physical thing or a mental state, that sends a sharp ray of extra meaning into the reader's mind.