Christmas is coming to Michigan but philanderer Claude Margolis won’t see it: he’s been stabbed in the neck several times. Virginia Barkeley, one of his conquests, is the prime suspect until Earl Duane Loftus, a dying leukaemia patient, says he dunnit.
First published in 1952, and long out of print, Vanish in an Instant is a brilliant psychodrama that has a triple-whammy ending. Told from the viewpoint of Eric Meecham, a cynical lawyer, it evokes a queasy atmosphere of “loss, futility [and] vulnerability”.
Millar, who died in 1994, was married to fellow Canadian and crime writer Ross Macdonald. However, she is more than her husband’s equal.
While there are shades of the Gothic (radiators clank “like ghosts rattling their chains”) and the hardboiled (“You’ve got a heart of gold, haven’t you? Cold and yellow”), she brings an existential bleakness to the genre. The depiction of Loftus’s mother, a middle-aged drunk, is devastating. A sad tale but an exhilarating one as we hurtle towards “the great hole of eternity”.
Vanish in an Instant by Margaret Millar (Pushkin Vertigo, £8.99)
