Sir, - I read with great enjoyment and agreement John Connolly's Irishman's Diary about the crime Ross Macdonald (November 2xth). Your readers may like to know that we claim Macdonald as Canadian. Born Kenneth Millar in Ontario (a friend of mine attended teachers' college with him), Macdonald married the American mystery writer Margaret Millar, and lived with her for years in California, the setting for much of his work. His early fiction, however, often makes use of Canadian settings and characters. The success of the American popular novelist John D. Macdonald forced Millar to alter his early pen-name from "John Ross Macdonald" to "Ross Macdonald".
The numerous critical monographs that his works have attracted generally discuss his Canadian origins and their effect on him. His plots always revolve around a complex, murky past incident, a device also familiar in the fiction of another Canadian writer, Robertson Davies, and never disappoint. - Yours, etc.,
Professor of English, University of Toronto, Canada.