BY BART BARNES Los Angeles Times/Washington Post News Service

WASHINGTON — Margaret Truman Daniel, former President Harry S. Truman’s only daughter, who emerged late in life as a writer of popular, Washington-based mystery novels, died today at an assisted-living facility in Chicago. She was 83.

A spokeswoman for the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Mo., said the family declined to disclose a specific cause of death. From 1980 to 1996, Mrs. Daniel wrote 13 murder mysteries. She debuted in the genre with “Murder in the White House,” which became a best seller and earned $200,000 for its author for the paperback rights alone. Literary critics offered mixed reviews.

Other novels in her “murder-at” series dealt with homicides at the Kennedy Center, Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the CIA, the Smithsonian, Embassy Row, Georgetown, the National Cathedral, the Pentagon, the Potomac and the National Gallery.

Mrs. Daniel also wrote biographies of her parents, a reminiscence of her own years in the White House as the only child of the president, and a collection of personal profiles of a dozen American women called “Women of Courage.”

She also had a short-lived career as a professional concert singer. As a singer, Mrs. Daniel is probably best remembered for President Truman’s angry letter threatening physical violence against a Washington Post music critic who wrote a poor review of one of her concerts in 1950.

She debuted as a singer in 1947 on a national radio program with the Detroit Symphony. Later she toured the country with a live concert program of arias and light classics, and she began appearing regularly on radio and television. In 1949, she signed a recording contract with RCA-Victor Records.

For seven years she had her own radio show, “Authors in the News.” But in 1956, following her marriage to journalist Clifton Daniel, who became managing editor of the New York Times, she reduced her stage appearances to occasional summer stock performances.

Mary Margaret Truman was born Feb. 17, 1924, in Independence and moved to Washington when her father, a Democrat, was elected to the Senate in 1934.

For the next seven years, the family spent the first half of each year in Washington and the second half in Missouri. The young Miss Truman graduated in 1942 from the old Gunston Hall girls school.

As a young girl, she was a soloist in the choir at Trinity Episcopal Church in Independence, where the choir director urged her get professional voice lessons.

She was a student at George Washington University when her father was sworn in as vice president in January 1945. Less that three months later, on April 12, President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, and Harry S. Truman became president. For the next seven years, the White House was her primary residence.

Continuing her studies at George Washington University, she had little or no Secret Service protection in the classrooms and student lounges, but she traveled by limousine.

At the White House, she fetched aspirin for visiting British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and exchanged pleasantries with military leaders. She christened the battleship Missouri, aboard which the Japanese signed the documents of surrender, ending the war on Sept. 2, 1945.

But neither she nor her mother were privy to such critical strategic wartime decisions as the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945.

Like the president, Mrs. Daniel soon tired of living in the White House. He called it “the Great White Jail.” She once said, “It was like living in a national monument.”

After graduating from college in 1946 with a bachelor’s degree in history, she took intensive voice lessons and launched her career as a professional singer. Her fees ranged from about $1,500 for a concert on stage to about $3,000 for a radio broadcast.

On Dec. 5, 1950, she did a music program of Schumann, Schubert and Mozart at Constitution Hall in Washington.

Washington Post music critic Paul Hume wrote in a review published in the next day’s editions: “Miss Truman is a unique American phenomenon with a pleasant voice of little size and fair quality. She is extremely attractive on stage. Yet Miss Truman cannot sing very well. She is flat a good deal of the time — more so last night than at any time we have heard her in past years.”

After the president read the review the next morning, he wrote to Hume: “I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert. It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful. When you write such poppycock … it shows conclusively that you’re off the beam. … Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below.”

Hume was stunned when he received Truman’s letter, and Post editors planned to publish it after having verified its authenticity. But Philip Graham, the publisher, vetoed the idea. He said he had received several angry letters from Truman and would not publish any of them.

Later, Hume told Milton Berliner, the music critic of the Washington News, about the president’s letter and Berliner told his editors, who promptly ordered up a story. The wire services picked it up and it was printed all over the country.

As a singer, Mrs. Daniel never advanced to the highest tier of the profession and soon gave it up altogether.

In 1956, she wrote her first book, “Souvenir, Margaret Truman’s Own Story” which was a memoir of her childhood in Missouri, her years at the White House and her career as a concert singer. The New York Herald Tribune book review section called it “a gracefully written tale of an average American girl drawn by chance into the White House.”

She followed with “White House Pets” (1969) and a 1972 biography of her father, “Harry S. Truman,” who died that year. The Christian Science Monitor called the biography, which sold more than 1 million copies, a “close-up of an undramatic man dramatically thrust into awesome power — and coping with it.”

In her first mystery, “Murder in the White House,” Secretary of State Lansard Blaine, a man with a shady past as a businessman and a history of womanizing, is found strangled to death in the family quarters of the White House.

There are several suspects in the case, and the investigation of the homicide exposes personal and political scandals in the president’s family and White House staff. The book was serialized in Good Housekeeping magazine.

Characteristic of the critical appraisal was the review by William French in the Toronto Globe and Mail: “Miss Truman seems to have studied Agatha Christie on how to introduce false leads, point to the wrong suspect and general confuse the issue. She does this with a certain amount of technical dexterity, but it’s too mechanical and juiceless.”

In an interview with The Washington Post, Mrs. Daniel said the idea of writing a Washington-based mystery came to her when she tired of another book she was writing.

“It was history. … I thought ‘This is really quite boring to me, so why shouldn’t it be boring to readers?’ So I just dropped it and suggested a murder mystery to my publishers.”

For more then a decade after the 1980 publication of “Murder in the White House,” Mrs. Daniel produced a Washington murder mystery a year, featuring bureaucrats, diplomats, politicians and influential business and media figures in leading roles.

Some of her characters appeared and reappeared in successive novels in the series. Several of the homicides were investigated by two lawyers who had found other lines of work, Mackenzie Smith, a professor at George Washington University, and his wife, Annabel Reed, the proprietor of a Georgetown art gallery.

Writing in The Post’s Book World, Jean M. White said Mrs. Daniel “writes a lively Washington scene with the sure hand of one who knows her way around the streets, institutions, restaurants, watering holes, people and politics.”

But Paul Piazza, chairman of the English department at St. Albans School in Washington, wrote in Book World that the characters of Smith and Reed “are cloyingly perfect, middle-aged yuppies: so stylishly banal that they are almost unbelievable.”

In 1986, four years after the death of her mother at 97, Mrs. Daniel wrote the biography “Bess W. Truman.” Helen Thomas in the New York Times Book Review called it “a refreshing, real and touching biography.”

Mrs. Daniel lived for many decades on Park Avenue in New York and was planning a move to Chicago when she fell ill.

Her husband died in 2000. A son, William Wallace Daniel, died that same year after being hit by a car.

Survivors include three sons, Clifton T. Daniel of Chicago, Harrison G. Daniel of New York state and Thomas W. Daniel of Starksboro, Vt.; and five grandchildren.