rejoin his faithful Paula. The novel The Three Roads appeared from Alfred A. Knopf in 1948 under the author's real name of Kenneth Millar, although later reprints have used the pseudonym he adopted following the success of his detective novels, Ross Macdonald. In the UK the novel was first published by Cassel & Co in 1950, and there was also a French translation that year with the title La Boîte de Pandore (Gallimard, 1950). Other translations have included the Italian L'assassino di mia moglie (Mondadori 1963) and the Finnish Valheen pitkät jäljet (Book Studio 2001). This was the first novel by Millar to be set in California, principally in San Diego and Los Angeles in this case. It also introduces "many of the psychosexual themes that lurk beneath the surface of the later novels", a characteristic of Alfred Hitchcock's films of that period too. But, rather than telling the unfolding story from the point of view of the protagonist, it is the only one of the author’s novels to use an omniscient narrator. There were problems with the book from the start. The publisher found it too slow-paced and asked for revisions that took several months to accomplish. Eventually Millar cut out "10,000 good words", mostly from the first half of the book, and concentrated the action into four days. Some critics have blamed the unsatisfactory performance of The Three Roads on its uncertainty of aim, the endless psychiatric theorising that mars the suspense of detection. But one contemporary review saw the consequent slowing of pace as beneficial. The book is less violent on the surface than Millar's previous three novels, so that "the physical energy has turned inward…and become psychological energy powerful enough to lift his style…to a high and complex level and keep it there". Certainly there is evidence of that heightening of style in, for the example, the description of Bret's waking with a hangover at the start of chapter 12, which teeters at first on the edge of redundant cliché before its transition into something more original: "He closed his eyes again, groping for the severed ends of his dreams. But the shadows of the dream evaded him, fleeing backward down the tunnel of sleep like insubstantial ghosts. Consciousness took hold of him like an obstetrical forceps and pulled him into life by the head. The pressure of reality clamped on his skull was painful and