The Three Roads

Bret Taylor, a naval officer during the Pacific War, married his wife Lorraine after knowing her only over a single overnight drinking binge while on shore leave.

The shock of the two events sends him into a mental lapse involving heavy memory loss and he spends nine months in a naval hospital in San Diego.

All that time he was visited by the woman who had loved him in the period before his impulsive marriage, divorced Paula Pangborn, a successful Hollywood screenwriter who uses her maiden name of West.

But since the mental specialist called in to help him, Dr Klifter, had given Bret the newspaper clippings relating to Lorraine's death, he has become obsessed with finding out who had killed her and strikes out on his own.

Fingerprint evidence proves that Miles was present in her home at the time of Lorraine’s murder, so that he is taken for the culprit, leaving Bret free to rejoin his faithful Paula.

The Three Roads appeared from Alfred A. Knopf in 1948 under the author's real name of Kenneth Millar, although later reprints have used the pseudonym he adopted following the success of his detective novels, Ross Macdonald.

[10] Certainly there is evidence of that heightening of style in, for the example, the description of Bret's waking with a hangover at the start of chapter 12, which teeters at first on the edge of redundant cliché before its transition into something more original: "He closed his eyes again, groping for the severed ends of his dreams.