Wall of Eyes was published by Random House in 1943. It was Millar’s fourth book but the first to move decisively beyond the comic-mystery mode of her earlier novels into the territory of psychological suspense. The household centers on two sisters: Kelsey, who is blind, and her sighted sister Alice. They live together in a complex domestic arrangement that includes Alice’s husband and several other dependents — a household in which Kelsey’s blindness has become the organizing principle around which everyone arranges their deceptions.
When a member of the household is found murdered, Inspector Sands investigates — but the real mystery is not who committed the murder but what the household’s intricate structure of lies and dependencies has been concealing. Kelsey’s blindness functions as a metaphor: she cannot see what is happening around her, but the sighted members of the household are equally blind — deliberately blind — to truths they find inconvenient.
The “wall of eyes” is the barrier between knowing and not-knowing, seeing and refusing to see. Millar would spend the rest of her career exploring this territory: the psychological mechanisms by which people maintain ignorance of what is happening in their own homes, their own families, their own minds.
Collecting Wall of Eyes
First edition (Random House, New York, 1943): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $150–$400
- Very good: $50–$150
- Early Millar — scarce in collectible condition