Friday's Forgotten Books, October 14, 2011

Ed Gorman is the author of BAD MOON RISING among other novels and anthologies. You can find him here.

For me Margaret Millar remains one of crime fiction's finest stylists and psychologists. She was also one of genre's cleverest wits. In her lighter novels she demolished blowhards, poseurs and megalomaniacs and she always did it with such hardy dispatch you knew she was having fun at the typewriter.

In The Murder of Miranda we have a black comedy with a centerpiece, and a quite moving one, about a beautiful woman coping with the facts that she's beginning to lose her looks.

Millar uses a fashionable private club to introduce us to her characters. Miranda, the aging beauty, is taken with the handsome twenty-year-old lifeguard Grady Keaton. She is in fact having an affair with him. Then she and Grady disappear and on stage comes one of Millar's few continuing leads, Tom Aaron who is hired to track them, which he does. Miranda and Grady are at a Mexican clinic where she can get more of her goat gland shots. Her vanity is undoing her. Aaron brings them back to the club.

There is a murder of course. Let me say that Millar, for me, was an even better plotter than Agatha Christie. Her twists are more exciting because they are more realistic. But you read Millar not just for the surprises and shocks but also for the characters. Somebody at the Penguin Club is a killer and here Millar delights in presenting the suspects. Is it the dirty old man who writes poison pen letters or the Twins who are among the most unique characters in mystery fiction? They get funnier and darker every time I reread the novel.

If you like traditional mysteries, you'll appreciate the dazzling story and people presents in the hot house atmosphere in this club for the wealthy and criminally insane.

Patti Abbott is the author of the newly released collection MONKEY JUSTICE.

The Movie-goer by Walker Percy

This book won the National Book Award in 1962. It is a brilliant exploration of a young man searching for both a way and the inclination to live a meaningful existence. Binx Bolling has returned from the war, taken up a job as a stock broker, and spends most of his spare time seducing his secretaries and attending movies. The story takes place in a New Orleans that seems totally Southern and certainly far from the New Orleans we think of today.

A lot of the book examines a certain notion of exceptionalism and honor southerners had at that time. Binx is repeatedly reminded of this by his aunt and various other characters in the book. This is the sort of book you will think about long after you close it. What Binx does to alleviate the ennui he suffers may not be persuasive as a cure, but it requires him to put himself and his narcissism aside.






Yvette Banek
Joe Barone
Bill Crider
Scott Cupp
Martin Edwards
Cullen Gallagher
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
Margot Kinberg
Rob Kitchin
K.A. Laity
B.V. Lawson
Steve Lewis/Curt J Evans
Todd Mason
J.F. Norris
Richard Pangborn
David Rachels
James Reasoner
Richard Robinson
Gerard Saylor
Ron Scheer
Kerrie Smith
Kevin Tipple
Tomcat