1990 SJordi Dolors

A young housewife has a dream of her own grave and becomes obsessed with investigating what happened on the day of her "death," four years before.

I enjoyed the style of this and found it very readable. The dialogue was quite good. I could picture the Hitchcock-style film version, everyone wearing nice suits and the pale, washed-out colors under a bright California sun. Unfortunately, the plot strained my suspension of disbelief quite a bit. I don't believe in selective amnesia, the love story seemed forced, and I saw all the twists coming well beforehand.

Theme notes: This is the second noirish thriller by a woman writer that I have read from this time period (the other being The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes), which exposed the ugliness of racism in polite American society. I shouldn't be so surprised about this, as race and racism permeates all of American culture, but it struck me as significant that both books should have such a strong theme.

The main character, Daisy, is overprotected and coddled and ultimately betrayed by everyone in her life, an indictment of sexist attitudes toward women masked as protectiveness. I hoped at the end that she would find happiness in her newfound independence. ( )

3.5 Stars. I read an article about Millar somewhere online and was intrigued. I haven’t read a lot of mysteries (since adolescence) so am probably not a good judge, but I enjoyed this one. I appreciated the introduction in which Millar tells how she came to write the book, how she developed the story from the first premise. There are some far-fetched bits that wouldn’t fly in fiction today and we might now expect more psychological depth. The story reflects the social structure, expectations, and prejudices of the time — though the author is clearly exposing, rather than buying into, them. The details didn’t seem as dated to me as I’d have expected, and the prose quality was higher than I generally expect from genre fiction. (The book was published in 1960, and the story takes place in 1959.) I’m particularly interested in women mystery writers and hope to read more. I'd probably try another one by Millar, especially if the character Steve Pinata were in it, but I think this is the only book in which he appears. ( )

It’s difficult to know how to talk about A STRANGER IN MY GRAVE without giving away too much of what makes it an interesting story so I’ll give the briefest plot synopsis possible. Daisy Harker, seemingly well-married and without much to fret about in life, has had a dream. In it she happens upon her own gravestone with a date of death some four years prior to the book’s present day. No one in Daisy’s life – not her mother, not her husband, not her husband’s best friend – thinks there is much to be made of the dream but Daisy becomes consumed by it. When she encounters a private investigator she hires him to help reconstruct that day in her life and determine what significance it has.

I’m not sure I completely buy this story’s premise – which is essentially that Daisy has blocked out an entire day from her personal memory (my subconscious kicked in every now and then with ‘really, just the one day?’) – but even so I was captivated by Daisy’s story. Millar reveals that what you see on the surface – Daisy’s perfect life with her perfect husband – isn’t even close to the truth. And the peeling back of the layers of betrayal she has experienced at the hands of just about everyone who should have been looking out for her makes for compelling reading. Of course they all had their reasons. They were protecting Daisy or saving her from some imagined hideous fate. Or was it all just self-interest and prejudice?

This is only the second book of hers that I’ve read but in both Millar explores the subject of childlessness. I wonder if there was something personal in the subject for her (though she did have one daughter) or if it was just an interesting subject for someone so keenly observant of the psychology of women. Here she also explores the subject of parenting more widely. In fact in a way almost all of the threads of the story are about parenting in some way and I liked the way they juxtaposed the traditionally accepted notions of ‘good parenting’ with someone brought up without parents. Stevens Pinata is the private detective Daisy engages and as the book progresses we learn that he was an abandoned baby who has no real knowledge of his heritage. Yet in many ways he is the most morally sound character in the book and this felt like Millar was making a kind of ‘up yours’ statement to the establishment. Or maybe I’m reading too much into things but either way I liked this element of the story.

Pinata is also responsible for my favourite line of the book. It occurs when he and Daisy encounter the name Camilla which Daisy assumes to be based on the camellia flower but is dismayed to find out it actually means “a little bed”.

Daisy: Oh. It doesn’t sound so pretty when you know what it means.
Pinata: That’s true of a lot of things.

Indeed. Millar – via Pinata mostly in this novel – is adept at distlling truths such as this one.

In short I liked this book a lot. It’s not really very mysterious in the traditional sense but it is full of tension because we don’t know if Daisy will learn everything she needs to, nor how she and those around her will react if she does. It’s just as easy to imagine the poor woman being hauled off in a padded jacket as what actually happens. Although it is in many ways a product of its time – some of the attitudes to women and racial minorities are wince inducing today – the book also has something of a modern sensibility in the way it explores a very domestic environment in great depth.

A vintage crime novel, in which a woman dreams that she discovered a grave with her name and date of birth on it, and a date of death four years previously. As days pass, she can't stop thinking about this dream, and decides that something important must have happened on that date four years previously to cause her to dream it as the date of her death. She therefore hires a private detective to investigate what happened on that date. So far so good--an interesting premise. And for the most part this book is well-plotted and entirely believable. Unfortunately, there is a big exception to the believability factor (for me at least), and that is that the woman immediately falls madly in love with the private detective she hires, even though she had been previously presented as happily married. I was annoyed that she fell in love with the detective and decided to leave her husband in such an abrupt way. However, I enjoyed the book enough that I will read other novels by Margaret Millar.

3 stars ( )