Syndicate Books Acquires the Estate of Margaret Millar, MWA Grandmaster

Syndicate Books is very excited to announce that we have acquired publishing rights for the complete works of Margaret Millar, MWA Grandmaster and one-time Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year. Millar was a pioneer of the modern psychological and domestic thriller. She was also the wife of Kenneth Millar, aka Ross Macdonald.

There was a lot of bad wood beneath the veneer of the "Greatest Generation" and Millar exposed a lot of it. See the official press release below and sign up for our newsletter for more details about the project as it develops.

Millar's Beast in View won the 1956 Edgar Award for Best Novel and she in turn received the title of Grandmaster from the Mystery Writer's of America in 1983.

Millar's Beast in View won the 1956 Edgar Award for Best Novel and she in turn received the title of Grandmaster from the Mystery Writer's of America in 1983.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New York, New York, October 23rd 2014—Paul Oliver, Publisher of Syndicate Books, has reached an agreement with Craig Tenney at Harold Ober Associates and the estate of Margaret Millar to publish the MWA Grandmaster’s complete works in North America.

Millar (1915-1994) was the author of 27 books and a pioneer of the modern psychological thriller. Millar's novel Beast in View won the 1956 Edgar Award for Best Novel and she was the recipient of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award in 1983. In 1965 she was selected by the Los Angeles Times as "Woman of the Year." Syndicate Books will publish all 27 of Millar’s books in ten print volumes in the fall of 2015 and all 27 titles as individual ebooks throughout 2015, starting in January.

2015 is the centennial of Margaret Millar’s birth. She was married to fellow crime writing legend Kenneth Millar, who is better known by his nom de plume, Ross Macdonald.

Syndicate Books is distributed to the trade by Soho Press, Inc.

Syndicate Store Open and Other News

Buy direct and support Syndicate Books.

Buy direct and support Syndicate Books.

With a few tweaks to the Syndicate website we are now able to offer you direct shipment on physical editions of our books—domestic and international. We also hope to have eBook deliver capabilities just around the corner.

So please check out the new Syndicate Shop. We'll be updating it with additional books, you know, as we make them.

Also check back in later this week for an important announcement about our next project.

Syndicate also hopes to have some concrete dates for the publication of the rest of Ted Lewis' novels in the next two weeks. The plan is still to publish all of them as eBooks by end of year.

"Get Carter" in the News

Less than a week out from the release of the Syndicate Books' edition of Get Carter and already some impressive coverage is coming in for the celebrated novel by Ted Lewis.

David L. Ulin of the Los Angeles Times writes: "Sums up the hard-boiled ethos as well as anything I’ve ever read... Get Carter is sui generis, the place where British noir begins."

MODCULTURE (UK) loves Katherine Grames' cover designs for the Jack Carter books.

One of the most important U.S. library publications, Booklist, gives Get Carter a coveted starred book review, writing, "Lewis has the soul of a serious novelist, capturing the brothers’ troubled relationship, the grimness of the surroundings, and, ultimately, the futility of being top dog."

Of Get Carter, Publishers Weekly writes: "[An] impressive novel... Evocative prose sets this above similarly themed crime stories... Ian Rankin fans who have not yet read Lewis will be pleased.

"Few crime writers could inject menace and desperation into small talk the way Lewis did," writes crime fiction blog-philosopher Peter Rozovsky on his essential Detectives Beyond Borders.