В тихом омуте

Известный американский автор Маргарет Миллар — обладательница престижных премий американской детсктивистики (Эдгара По — в 1956 г. и Гроссмейстерский приз — в 1983 г.).

В настоящий сборник вошли лучшие, по мнению критики, произведения писательницы, в которых детективное начало сочетается с исследованием внутренне-. го мира главных персонажей.

Gordon Foster’s activities took a sudden bounce off the track of his daily pattern of staid middle-class living when a girl asked him for a match in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel.

In a matter of weeks the girl Ruby followed Gordon home to Channel City and injected a somewhat discordant note into his otherwise peaceful marriage. Gordon’s wife, a fiercely virtuous woman, fought all through the hot summer to hold her husband, while most of the rest of Channel City lay prostrate under the burning coastal sun.

Yet Ruby’s all but hopeless love for Gordon is paralleled by other loves, equally poignant, equally real. Mrs. Millar’s novel shows, sometimes with biting humor, sometimes with warm compassion, how extraordinary the lives and loves of those around us can be.

Since her writing debut fourteen years ago, Margaret Millar has had a brilliant and variegated career as a mystery writer, as a humorist and as a serious novelist. For nearly half of those fourteen years she has been working on It is her first major attempt to deal with the lives and loves of “ordinary” middle-class people in contemporary society.

At a crisis in his second marriage, Ron Galloway dropped out of sight. Having said good-bye to his wife and his sons in Toronto, he started out for his hunting lodge, where he had invited some friends to spend the weekend with him. When Ron failed to appear, two of his friends, Ralph Turee and Harry Bream, took it upon themselves to investigate his disappearance. Even before his body was found, they discovered that Ron had been leading a double life.

The doubleness of Ron’s life was more than matched by the doubleness of his death, and the events that followed his death. Because a beautifully controlled irony is its keynote, any further summary of the story would reveal too much, and too little. When revelation does come, to Ralph Turee and the reader, it comes with the shock and illuminative flash of a carefully laid explosion.

Did she fall? When Mrs. Wilma Wyatt crashed to her death from the balcony of her room in a Mexico City hotel, no one knew whether it was an accident, suicide or murder. And when, shortly after, her friend and travelling companion, Amy Kellogg, disappeared into thin air, the mystery deepened. Did Wilma fall...? Or was she pushed?