The Three Roads, published in 1948, was the fourth novel by Kenneth Millar, and the final one using his real name before he started writing detective novels, ultimately using his later pseudonym, Ross Macdonald. In its use of psychological motifs and a Californian setting, The Three Roads anticipates Macdonald's later fiction. The 1980 movie Deadly Companion (alternatively Double Negative) was based on this novel. Plot The book is divided into four sections titled Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Doomsday, of which the last of these takes up fully half the novel. Bret Taylor, a naval officer during the Pacific War, married his wife Lorraine after knowing her only over a single overnight drinking binge while on shore leave. After more months on duty, ending when his ship was destroyed in a kamikaze attack, he returned home to find Lorraine freshly murdered in the home he bought for her but has never seen. The shock of the two events sends him into a mental lapse involving heavy memory loss and he spends nine months in a naval hospital in San Diego. All that time he was visited by the woman who had loved him in the period before his impulsive marriage, divorced Paula Pangborn, a successful Hollywood screenwriter who uses her maiden name of West. As Bret's memory begins to return, he is released into Paula's care and they drive up to Los Angeles on the Monday. But since the mental specialist called in to help him, Dr Klifter, had given Bret the newspaper clippings relating to Lorraine's death, he has become obsessed with finding out who had killed her and strikes out on his own. He gets into a fight in the Golden Slipper Café, where Lorraine had been drinking on the night she died, and is taken home by Larry Miles to sleep off his hangover. The next - and final - day, Bret comes to suspect that Miles had been Lorraine's murderer. It emerges eventually that Bret had discovered Miles in bed with Lorraine on his unannounced return and had killed her himself. Miles, knowing the truth, had been blackmailing Paula to keep the responsibility secret. Police break up the subsequent fight between the men and shoot Miles for resisting arrest. Fingerprint evidence proves that Miles was present in her home at the time of Lorraine’s murder, so that he is taken for the culprit, leaving Bret free to