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Beast In View
A psychological thriller by a mistress of suspense at the top of her form and 1956 winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award. What starts with a crank call from an old school chum sets the lonely, aloof, financially comfortable Miss Helen Clarvoe on a path as predictable only as madness. Lured from her rooms in a second-rate residential Hollywood hotel, she finds herself stranded in the more perilous terrain of extortion, pornography, vengeance, and ultimately murder.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1955
About the author
Margaret Millar
133 books168 followersMargaret Ellis Millar (née Sturm) was an American-Canadian mystery and suspense writer. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, she was educated there and in Toronto. She moved to the United States after marrying Kenneth Millar (better known under the pen name Ross Macdonald). They resided for decades in the city of Santa Barbara, which was often utilized as a locale in her later novels under the pseudonyms of San Felice or Santa Felicia.
Millar's books are distinguished by sophistication of characterization. Often we are shown the rather complex interior lives of the people in her books, with issues of class, insecurity, failed ambitions, loneliness or existential isolation or paranoia often being explored with an almost literary quality that transcends the mystery genre. Unusual people, mild societal misfits or people who don't quite fit into their surroundings are given much interior detail. In some of the books we are given chilling and fascinating insight into what it feels like to be losing touch with reality and evolving into madness. In general, she is a writer of both expressive description and yet admirable economy, often ambitious in the sociological underpinnings of the stories and the quality of the writing.
Millar often delivers effective and ingenious "surprise endings," but the details that would allow the solution of the surprise have usually been subtly included, in the best genre tradition. One of the distinctions of her books, however, is that they would be interesting, even if you knew how they were going to end, because they are every bit as much about subtleties of human interaction and rich psychological detail of individual characters as they are about the plot.
Millar was a pioneer in writing intelligently about the psychology of women. Even as early as the '40s and '50s, her books have a very mature and matter-of-fact view of class distinctions, sexual freedom and frustration, and the ambivalence of moral codes depending on a character's economic circumstances. Her earliest novels seem unusually frank. Read against the backdrop of Production Code-era movies of the time, they remind us that life as lived in the '40s and '50s was not as black-and-white morally as Hollywood would have us believe.
While she was not known for any one recurring detective (unlike her husband, whose constant gumshoe was Lew Archer), she occasionally used a detective character for more than one novel. Among her occasional ongoing sleuths were Canadians Dr. Paul Prye (her first invention, in the earliest books) and Inspector Sands (a quiet, unassuming Canadian police inspector who might be the most endearing of her recurring inventions). In the California years, a few books featured either Joe Quinn, a rather down-on-his-luck private eye, or Tom Aragorn, a young, Hispanic lawyer.
Sadly, most of Millar's books are out of print in America, with the exception of the short story collection The Couple Next Door and two novels, An Air That Kills and Do Evil In Return, that have been re-issued as classics by Stark House Press in California.
In 1956 Millar won the Edgar Allan Poe Awards, Best Novel award for Beast in View. In 1965 she was awarded the Woman of the Year Award by the Los Angeles Times. In 1983 she was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America in recognition of her lifetime achievements.
Millar's books are distinguished by sophistication of characterization. Often we are shown the rather complex interior lives of the people in her books, with issues of class, insecurity, failed ambitions, loneliness or existential isolation or paranoia often being explored with an almost literary quality that transcends the mystery genre. Unusual people, mild societal misfits or people who don't quite fit into their surroundings are given much interior detail. In some of the books we are given chilling and fascinating insight into what it feels like to be losing touch with reality and evolving into madness. In general, she is a writer of both expressive description and yet admirable economy, often ambitious in the sociological underpinnings of the stories and the quality of the writing.
Millar often delivers effective and ingenious "surprise endings," but the details that would allow the solution of the surprise have usually been subtly included, in the best genre tradition. One of the distinctions of her books, however, is that they would be interesting, even if you knew how they were going to end, because they are every bit as much about subtleties of human interaction and rich psychological detail of individual characters as they are about the plot.
Millar was a pioneer in writing intelligently about the psychology of women. Even as early as the '40s and '50s, her books have a very mature and matter-of-fact view of class distinctions, sexual freedom and frustration, and the ambivalence of moral codes depending on a character's economic circumstances. Her earliest novels seem unusually frank. Read against the backdrop of Production Code-era movies of the time, they remind us that life as lived in the '40s and '50s was not as black-and-white morally as Hollywood would have us believe.
While she was not known for any one recurring detective (unlike her husband, whose constant gumshoe was Lew Archer), she occasionally used a detective character for more than one novel. Among her occasional ongoing sleuths were Canadians Dr. Paul Prye (her first invention, in the earliest books) and Inspector Sands (a quiet, unassuming Canadian police inspector who might be the most endearing of her recurring inventions). In the California years, a few books featured either Joe Quinn, a rather down-on-his-luck private eye, or Tom Aragorn, a young, Hispanic lawyer.
Sadly, most of Millar's books are out of print in America, with the exception of the short story collection The Couple Next Door and two novels, An Air That Kills and Do Evil In Return, that have been re-issued as classics by Stark House Press in California.
In 1956 Millar won the Edgar Allan Poe Awards, Best Novel award for Beast in View. In 1965 she was awarded the Woman of the Year Award by the Los Angeles Times. In 1983 she was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America in recognition of her lifetime achievements.
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March 18, 2019
"If I killed everyone I hated, people would be dying like flies all over town."
Helen Clarvoe recieves a disturbing and threatening phone call. Is the woman on the other end of the line involved in some sort of twisted extortion racket, or just a psychopath in it for the thrills? That's what she asks her old family retainer to find out, and his attempts at playing amateur detective may bring Helen closer to danger than she's ever been.
This is an utterly engaging thriller that won the 1956 Edgar Award for Best Novel. It's a gripping, well written tale that I tore through in only a couple of days. Millar's novel is bursting with amazing lines that I wish I'd written:
Blackshear felt a great pity for her not because of her tears but because of all the struggle it had taken to produce them.
And:
"She's crafty, she hasn't had to do any of the destroying herself. She just throws in the bone and lets the dogs fight each other over it. And there's usually some meat of truth on the bone."
I'm planning to read more by Maggie Millar in the near future.
Helen Clarvoe recieves a disturbing and threatening phone call. Is the woman on the other end of the line involved in some sort of twisted extortion racket, or just a psychopath in it for the thrills? That's what she asks her old family retainer to find out, and his attempts at playing amateur detective may bring Helen closer to danger than she's ever been.
This is an utterly engaging thriller that won the 1956 Edgar Award for Best Novel. It's a gripping, well written tale that I tore through in only a couple of days. Millar's novel is bursting with amazing lines that I wish I'd written:
Blackshear felt a great pity for her not because of her tears but because of all the struggle it had taken to produce them.
And:
"She's crafty, she hasn't had to do any of the destroying herself. She just throws in the bone and lets the dogs fight each other over it. And there's usually some meat of truth on the bone."
I'm planning to read more by Maggie Millar in the near future.
June 27, 2021
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to the fiction of Margaret Millar and her 1955 novel Beast In View. This was in my Goldilocks Zone, a macabre tale set in Los Angeles of the '50s filled with compelling characters and expertly crafted prose culminating in a surprise ending. Almost as fun as a novel set in the days when phone numbers had names is one where the author managed to exceed my expectations.
Miss Helen Clarvoe is a quiet, solitary thirty-year-old who has moved into a small hotel in Hollywood. She's inherited investments from her late, unloving father but is estranged from her vapid mother Verna and brother Douglas, whose recent marriage was annulled within weeks and lives at home, henpecked by mother and hiding his homosexuality. Helen has few if any friends and is too inhibited to travel. Her isolation leaves her vulnerable to a phone caller who gives the name Evelyn Merrick and claiming to be an old friend, begins to taunt and torture Helen, promising her a bloody future.
Helen dispatches a letter to Paul Blackshear, the fifty-year-old financial manager who handles her investments. Blackshear doesn't care for Helen, who he finds graceless and miserly, but agrees to locate Evelyn Merrick. Blackshear tracks her through the underworld of illicit modeling and discovers that Evelyn Merrick is Helen's sister-in-law, who Helen had apparently forgotten. When Helen changes her phone number to an unlisted one, Evelyn begins calling Verna, torturing her with news she doesn't want to hear about her son. Evelyn lives to fill a pay phone with a buck's worth of dimes and torment anyone who crosses her. She definitely has a screw loose.
People huddling in doorways and under awnings looked at her curiously. She knew they were thinking how unusual it was to see such a gay, pretty girl running alone in the rain. They didn't realize that the rain couldn't touch her, she was waterproof; and only a few of the smart ones guessed the real reason why she never got tired or out of breath. Her body ran on a new fuel, rays from the night air. Occasionally one of the smart ones tried to follow her to get her secret, to watch her refuelling, but these spies were quite easy to detect and she was always able to evade them. Only in the strictest privacy did she store up her rays, breathing deeply first through one nostril and then the other, to filter out the irritants.
Beast In View excels by focusing more on the psychology of Millar's damaged characters as opposed to where they exist on some chessboard of a thriller plot. She seems fascinated by the telephone as a conduit of evil and naturally those most vulnerable would be a prisoner of her own home, with no friends or family to turn to. I enjoyed the leanness of the storytelling and how venal Evelyn Merrick is, but was surprised by how expertly crafted the prose was. I often hurry through this to get caught up in the story, but Millar lines and colors her beautifully.
June arrived late after a detour through the bar and up the back staircase which led to the door of Miss Clarvoe's kitchenette. Sometimes Miss Clarvoe herself used this back staircase. June had often seen her slipping in or out like a thin, frightened ghost trying to avoid real people.
The door to the kitchenette was locked. Miss Clarvoe locked everything. It was rumored around the hotel that she kept a great deal of money hidden in her suite because she didn't trust banks. But this was a common rumor, usually started by bellboys, who enjoyed planning various larcenies when they were too broke to play the ponies.
June didn't believe the rumor. Miss Clarvoe locked things up because she was the kind of person who always locked things up whether they were valuable or not.
June knocked on the door and waited, swaying a little, partly because the martini had been double, and partly because a radio down the hall was playing a waltz and waltzes always made her sway. Back and forth her scrawny little body moved under the cheap plaid coat.
Miss Clarvoe's voice cut across the music like a knife through butter. "Who's there?"
It came as no surprise to me that Beast In View was twice adapted as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The 1964 version starred Joan Hackett as Helen Clarvoe and the great Kevin McCarthy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers as Paul Blackshear. Millar's novel was adapted in name only for the series revival in 1986, with Janet Eilber playing a soon-to-be-remarried psychiatrist who is convinced that her first husband is stalking her.
Margaret Millar was born in the Canadian town of Kitchener in 1915. She attended the University of Toronto on scholarship but dropped out after three years when her mother passed away. She was writing poems and studying psychology when at the age 22 she married a childhood suitor named Ken Millar, who'd publish mysteries to great success as "Ross Macdonald" Millar's writing career had eclipsed her husband's by the time they settled in Santa Barbara, California during World War II. She died in Montecito in 1994.
In the event you missed them: Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
Miss Helen Clarvoe is a quiet, solitary thirty-year-old who has moved into a small hotel in Hollywood. She's inherited investments from her late, unloving father but is estranged from her vapid mother Verna and brother Douglas, whose recent marriage was annulled within weeks and lives at home, henpecked by mother and hiding his homosexuality. Helen has few if any friends and is too inhibited to travel. Her isolation leaves her vulnerable to a phone caller who gives the name Evelyn Merrick and claiming to be an old friend, begins to taunt and torture Helen, promising her a bloody future.
Helen dispatches a letter to Paul Blackshear, the fifty-year-old financial manager who handles her investments. Blackshear doesn't care for Helen, who he finds graceless and miserly, but agrees to locate Evelyn Merrick. Blackshear tracks her through the underworld of illicit modeling and discovers that Evelyn Merrick is Helen's sister-in-law, who Helen had apparently forgotten. When Helen changes her phone number to an unlisted one, Evelyn begins calling Verna, torturing her with news she doesn't want to hear about her son. Evelyn lives to fill a pay phone with a buck's worth of dimes and torment anyone who crosses her. She definitely has a screw loose.
People huddling in doorways and under awnings looked at her curiously. She knew they were thinking how unusual it was to see such a gay, pretty girl running alone in the rain. They didn't realize that the rain couldn't touch her, she was waterproof; and only a few of the smart ones guessed the real reason why she never got tired or out of breath. Her body ran on a new fuel, rays from the night air. Occasionally one of the smart ones tried to follow her to get her secret, to watch her refuelling, but these spies were quite easy to detect and she was always able to evade them. Only in the strictest privacy did she store up her rays, breathing deeply first through one nostril and then the other, to filter out the irritants.
Beast In View excels by focusing more on the psychology of Millar's damaged characters as opposed to where they exist on some chessboard of a thriller plot. She seems fascinated by the telephone as a conduit of evil and naturally those most vulnerable would be a prisoner of her own home, with no friends or family to turn to. I enjoyed the leanness of the storytelling and how venal Evelyn Merrick is, but was surprised by how expertly crafted the prose was. I often hurry through this to get caught up in the story, but Millar lines and colors her beautifully.
June arrived late after a detour through the bar and up the back staircase which led to the door of Miss Clarvoe's kitchenette. Sometimes Miss Clarvoe herself used this back staircase. June had often seen her slipping in or out like a thin, frightened ghost trying to avoid real people.
The door to the kitchenette was locked. Miss Clarvoe locked everything. It was rumored around the hotel that she kept a great deal of money hidden in her suite because she didn't trust banks. But this was a common rumor, usually started by bellboys, who enjoyed planning various larcenies when they were too broke to play the ponies.
June didn't believe the rumor. Miss Clarvoe locked things up because she was the kind of person who always locked things up whether they were valuable or not.
June knocked on the door and waited, swaying a little, partly because the martini had been double, and partly because a radio down the hall was playing a waltz and waltzes always made her sway. Back and forth her scrawny little body moved under the cheap plaid coat.
Miss Clarvoe's voice cut across the music like a knife through butter. "Who's there?"
It came as no surprise to me that Beast In View was twice adapted as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The 1964 version starred Joan Hackett as Helen Clarvoe and the great Kevin McCarthy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers as Paul Blackshear. Millar's novel was adapted in name only for the series revival in 1986, with Janet Eilber playing a soon-to-be-remarried psychiatrist who is convinced that her first husband is stalking her.
Margaret Millar was born in the Canadian town of Kitchener in 1915. She attended the University of Toronto on scholarship but dropped out after three years when her mother passed away. She was writing poems and studying psychology when at the age 22 she married a childhood suitor named Ken Millar, who'd publish mysteries to great success as "Ross Macdonald" Millar's writing career had eclipsed her husband's by the time they settled in Santa Barbara, California during World War II. She died in Montecito in 1994.
In the event you missed them: Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
January 18, 2023
An odd one, Beast in View, is a novella about a young woman, Helen, who is being menaced by horrible phone calls. Helen seeks help from an old friend of her father's, Mr. Blackshear. Helen has been undone by these threatening calls
from a woman and she wants them stopped.
Mr. Blackshear discovers the caller is Evelyn Merrick. At first, Helen doesn't even remember who Evelyn Merrick is. The calls come out of the blue, but then she recalls her childhood friend and her brother's ex-wife, Evie. As Mr. Blackshear does some more investigation, he discovers lots of skeletons in the closet that aren't shocking or particularly interesting to a modern reader.
One suicide and murder later and the perpetrator is revealed. It is not a fun denouement.
from a woman and she wants them stopped.
Mr. Blackshear discovers the caller is Evelyn Merrick. At first, Helen doesn't even remember who Evelyn Merrick is. The calls come out of the blue, but then she recalls her childhood friend and her brother's ex-wife, Evie. As Mr. Blackshear does some more investigation, he discovers lots of skeletons in the closet that aren't shocking or particularly interesting to a modern reader.
One suicide and murder later and the perpetrator is revealed. It is not a fun denouement.
June 30, 2024
I have chosen this book because Margaret Millar was Ross Macdonald's wife and I wanted to see what kind of writer she was.
This is not a mystery in a classical sense; there is neither a classical murder mystery nor a classical investigator. It is rather a psychological thriller dealing with childhood traumas leading to dissociative identity disorder in its turn resulting in stalking and other crimes.
The novel seemed somewhat boring for my taste
This is not a mystery in a classical sense; there is neither a classical murder mystery nor a classical investigator. It is rather a psychological thriller dealing with childhood traumas leading to dissociative identity disorder in its turn resulting in stalking and other crimes.
The novel seemed somewhat boring for my taste
June 14, 2020
[9/10]
... it was a chase, and she was the beast in view.
A spinster living alone in a rundown hotel gets an unsolicited phone call. A stranger claims to have a mirror ball that spells trouble ahead for Helen Clarvoe. The hunt is on, exploring the dark tunnels of a deranged mind, but who is the true beast? The hunter or the prey?
“You know who this is?”
“No.”
“A friend.”
“I have a great many friends,” Miss Clarvoe lied.
In the mirror above the telephone stand she saw her mouth repeating the lie, enjoying it, and she saw her head nod in quick affirmation – this lie is true, yes, this is a very true lie. Only her eyes refused to be convinced. Embarrassed, they blinked and glanced away.
I am thoroughly captivated by classic crime stories, by those writers who could deliver a big punch in a tight package. Back in those days publishers (and probably readers) insisted on dime novels that could be easily printed and fast consumed, so authors were a lot more careful with their dialogues, their similes and their characters than in contemporary market where some think 1000 pages are better than 150. More buck for the dollar, so to speak (I’ve been guilty myself of this when choosing some fantasy epics for immersion instead of literary style) .
This is my first novel by Margaret Millar, and I find her ability to sketch a character, even a walk-in/walk out concierge role *, in a single paragraph that captures the true essence of their personality, by her talent to deliver psychological insight in a throwaway one line of dialogue**. I don’t plan to write a synopsis, the less you know about the actual chase, the better I think you will appreciate the construction of the case.
Note * : After thirty years in the business, people meant no more to him than individual bees do to a beekeeper. Their differences were lost in a welter of statistics, eradicated by sheer weight of numbers. They came and went; ate, drank, were happy, sad, thin, fat; stole towels and left behind toothbrushes, books, girdles, jewelry; burned holes in furniture, slipped in bathtubs, jumped out of windows. They were all alike, swarming around the hive, and Mr. Horner wore a protective net of indifference over his head and shoulders.
Note ** : “You’ll always be cheated, Mrs. Clarvoe, if you put your value on the wrong things.”
Note *** : Margaret Millar was the wife of Kenneth Millar, better known to genre fans as Ross Macdonald, and their styles are so similar that I wonder if they helped each other out with revisions and rewrites, polishing their dialogues and their metaphors until they sparkled.
Miss Clarvoe hung up. She knew how to deal with June and others like her. One hung up. One severed connections. What Miss Clarvoe did not realize was that she had severed too many connections in her life, she had hung up too often, too easily, on too many people. Now, at thirty, she was alone.
Coming back to the start of the novel, to that scary telephone call that forced Helen Clarvoe to acknowledge her own self delusion and to issue a call for help to the world outside her hotel room, I wondered what the crime was, and who will assume the role of private detective? Millar finds the unusual angle here, too, when she picks Paul Blackshear, a laid-back financial consultant with a keen eye for detail. Mr. Blackshear surprises even himself when he agrees to investigate the telephone call received by the daughter of his former wealthy client.
At fifty, he was retiring gracefully, by degrees, partly because he could afford to, but mostly because boredom had set in, like a too early winter. Things had begun to repeat themselves; new situations reminded him of past situations, and people he met for the first time were exactly like people he’d known for years. Nothing was new anymore.
Curiosity is a powerful motivator in a man who believes he has seen all aspects of human folly in his long career, but Paul Blackshear brings much more into this game of cat and mouse that will soon become deadly serious. His empathy is balanced by his integrity that refuses to sugarcoat the issues with banalities or polite consolations, in stark contrast with the secretive and paranoid Helen Clarvoe, or later in encounters with several witnesses and relatives. This is what he has to say about his unexpected first client as a detective:
She existed by, for, and unto herself, shut off from the world by a wall of money and the iron bars of her egotism.
Soon, Mr. Blackshear has a suspect, a former school friend of Helen named Evelyn Merrick, but not a motive, even as the threatening phone calls escalate to the people he investigates, maliciously dripping poison in the ears of the most vulnerable.
“It’s a little more than mischief, I’m afraid.”
“Well, she may be insane, but she seems to know a lot about human frailties.”
As I try to steer clear of spoiler pitfalls, I am relying on more samples from the text, hoping to wet the appetite of readers who enjoyed similar novel or movies. Patricia Highsmith and Alfred Hitchcock are two well known names that come to mind in the vein of the Goodreads staple of ‘if you liked this, you might like ...’. As a fun trivia, I checked if the novel has been filmed, and apparently there is a TV episode of it in “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour” from 1964.
He followed her down the dimly-lit hall to the den. A fire was spluttering in the raised fieldstone fire-pit and the room was like a kiln. In spite of the heat, Verna Clarvoe looked pale and cold, a starved sparrow preserved in ice. [...]In the past he had seen her in character, playing the role she thought was expected of her, the pretty and frivolous wife of a man who could afford her. She was still onstage, but she’d forgotten her lines, and the props and backdrop had been removed and the audience had long since departed.
===
“A plate breaks and you throw it away. A person breaks and all you can do is pick up the pieces and try to put them together the best way you can.”
Finally, I plan to read more from the author, but I’m not sure which book to pick.
... it was a chase, and she was the beast in view.
A spinster living alone in a rundown hotel gets an unsolicited phone call. A stranger claims to have a mirror ball that spells trouble ahead for Helen Clarvoe. The hunt is on, exploring the dark tunnels of a deranged mind, but who is the true beast? The hunter or the prey?
“You know who this is?”
“No.”
“A friend.”
“I have a great many friends,” Miss Clarvoe lied.
In the mirror above the telephone stand she saw her mouth repeating the lie, enjoying it, and she saw her head nod in quick affirmation – this lie is true, yes, this is a very true lie. Only her eyes refused to be convinced. Embarrassed, they blinked and glanced away.
I am thoroughly captivated by classic crime stories, by those writers who could deliver a big punch in a tight package. Back in those days publishers (and probably readers) insisted on dime novels that could be easily printed and fast consumed, so authors were a lot more careful with their dialogues, their similes and their characters than in contemporary market where some think 1000 pages are better than 150. More buck for the dollar, so to speak (I’ve been guilty myself of this when choosing some fantasy epics for immersion instead of literary style) .
This is my first novel by Margaret Millar, and I find her ability to sketch a character, even a walk-in/walk out concierge role *, in a single paragraph that captures the true essence of their personality, by her talent to deliver psychological insight in a throwaway one line of dialogue**. I don’t plan to write a synopsis, the less you know about the actual chase, the better I think you will appreciate the construction of the case.
Note * : After thirty years in the business, people meant no more to him than individual bees do to a beekeeper. Their differences were lost in a welter of statistics, eradicated by sheer weight of numbers. They came and went; ate, drank, were happy, sad, thin, fat; stole towels and left behind toothbrushes, books, girdles, jewelry; burned holes in furniture, slipped in bathtubs, jumped out of windows. They were all alike, swarming around the hive, and Mr. Horner wore a protective net of indifference over his head and shoulders.
Note ** : “You’ll always be cheated, Mrs. Clarvoe, if you put your value on the wrong things.”
Note *** : Margaret Millar was the wife of Kenneth Millar, better known to genre fans as Ross Macdonald, and their styles are so similar that I wonder if they helped each other out with revisions and rewrites, polishing their dialogues and their metaphors until they sparkled.
Miss Clarvoe hung up. She knew how to deal with June and others like her. One hung up. One severed connections. What Miss Clarvoe did not realize was that she had severed too many connections in her life, she had hung up too often, too easily, on too many people. Now, at thirty, she was alone.
Coming back to the start of the novel, to that scary telephone call that forced Helen Clarvoe to acknowledge her own self delusion and to issue a call for help to the world outside her hotel room, I wondered what the crime was, and who will assume the role of private detective? Millar finds the unusual angle here, too, when she picks Paul Blackshear, a laid-back financial consultant with a keen eye for detail. Mr. Blackshear surprises even himself when he agrees to investigate the telephone call received by the daughter of his former wealthy client.
At fifty, he was retiring gracefully, by degrees, partly because he could afford to, but mostly because boredom had set in, like a too early winter. Things had begun to repeat themselves; new situations reminded him of past situations, and people he met for the first time were exactly like people he’d known for years. Nothing was new anymore.
Curiosity is a powerful motivator in a man who believes he has seen all aspects of human folly in his long career, but Paul Blackshear brings much more into this game of cat and mouse that will soon become deadly serious. His empathy is balanced by his integrity that refuses to sugarcoat the issues with banalities or polite consolations, in stark contrast with the secretive and paranoid Helen Clarvoe, or later in encounters with several witnesses and relatives. This is what he has to say about his unexpected first client as a detective:
She existed by, for, and unto herself, shut off from the world by a wall of money and the iron bars of her egotism.
Soon, Mr. Blackshear has a suspect, a former school friend of Helen named Evelyn Merrick, but not a motive, even as the threatening phone calls escalate to the people he investigates, maliciously dripping poison in the ears of the most vulnerable.
“It’s a little more than mischief, I’m afraid.”
“Well, she may be insane, but she seems to know a lot about human frailties.”
As I try to steer clear of spoiler pitfalls, I am relying on more samples from the text, hoping to wet the appetite of readers who enjoyed similar novel or movies. Patricia Highsmith and Alfred Hitchcock are two well known names that come to mind in the vein of the Goodreads staple of ‘if you liked this, you might like ...’. As a fun trivia, I checked if the novel has been filmed, and apparently there is a TV episode of it in “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour” from 1964.
He followed her down the dimly-lit hall to the den. A fire was spluttering in the raised fieldstone fire-pit and the room was like a kiln. In spite of the heat, Verna Clarvoe looked pale and cold, a starved sparrow preserved in ice. [...]In the past he had seen her in character, playing the role she thought was expected of her, the pretty and frivolous wife of a man who could afford her. She was still onstage, but she’d forgotten her lines, and the props and backdrop had been removed and the audience had long since departed.
===
“A plate breaks and you throw it away. A person breaks and all you can do is pick up the pieces and try to put them together the best way you can.”
Finally, I plan to read more from the author, but I’m not sure which book to pick.
November 7, 2012
A gripping and unsettling thriller that's brilliantly written.
Margaret Millar was the wife of Ross MacDonald. What a talented couple! This is considered to be her masterpiece, winning the Edgar Award over another wonderful literary thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley and finding a place in Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books as chosen by H.R.F. Keating amongst other similar lists.
Helen Carvoe receives a crank call, with the help of her semi-retired stockbroker cajoled in to working as a reluctant PI she decides must find out the source. Lured from her rooms in a second-rate residential Hollywood hotel, she finds herself stranded in the more perilous terrain of extortion, pornography, vengeance, and ultimately murder.
Keating calls it "a study in madness and a splendid conjuring trick with no cheating," and "a deep and compassionate study of the dark places of the human psyche" whilst praising the superb quality of her prose and in this instance he is not wrong and his words are no exagerration. This really is the psychological thriller/crime fiction at its best, in all ways but not least through the authors choice of words.
Millar takes the reader on a journey far beyond the cliche of your standard crime novel, into a middle-class Los Angeles of the 1950s, complete with societal constraints and the repression that comes with them giving the author the opportunity to make a thoughtful insight in to what a life of disappointments can do to the human soul. This setting and style seems to have been a major influence on Megan Abbott but then I'm always thinking about her when I read something amazing so I'll also mention her partner in crime Sara Gran as a way to demonstrate my wide analytical ability. In addition to this I noticed the evolution of what Dorothy B. Hughes had brought to the genre a decade previously. As Nancy mentions in her review Helen Clarvoe is a loner but Beast in View is a novel with its emphasis on human weaknesses and the way they change the way we interact with each other and that is another reason why this novel is so much more than genre fiction.
I won't discuss the ending beyond mirroring the reaction of Keating, I for one enjoyed the prestige of Millar's conjuring trick.
Margaret Millar was the wife of Ross MacDonald. What a talented couple! This is considered to be her masterpiece, winning the Edgar Award over another wonderful literary thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley and finding a place in Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books as chosen by H.R.F. Keating amongst other similar lists.
Helen Carvoe receives a crank call, with the help of her semi-retired stockbroker cajoled in to working as a reluctant PI she decides must find out the source. Lured from her rooms in a second-rate residential Hollywood hotel, she finds herself stranded in the more perilous terrain of extortion, pornography, vengeance, and ultimately murder.
Keating calls it "a study in madness and a splendid conjuring trick with no cheating," and "a deep and compassionate study of the dark places of the human psyche" whilst praising the superb quality of her prose and in this instance he is not wrong and his words are no exagerration. This really is the psychological thriller/crime fiction at its best, in all ways but not least through the authors choice of words.
Millar takes the reader on a journey far beyond the cliche of your standard crime novel, into a middle-class Los Angeles of the 1950s, complete with societal constraints and the repression that comes with them giving the author the opportunity to make a thoughtful insight in to what a life of disappointments can do to the human soul. This setting and style seems to have been a major influence on Megan Abbott but then I'm always thinking about her when I read something amazing so I'll also mention her partner in crime Sara Gran as a way to demonstrate my wide analytical ability. In addition to this I noticed the evolution of what Dorothy B. Hughes had brought to the genre a decade previously. As Nancy mentions in her review Helen Clarvoe is a loner but Beast in View is a novel with its emphasis on human weaknesses and the way they change the way we interact with each other and that is another reason why this novel is so much more than genre fiction.
I won't discuss the ending beyond mirroring the reaction of Keating, I for one enjoyed the prestige of Millar's conjuring trick.
November 2, 2021
Usually, after making a series of telephone calls, she felt a certain relief and relaxation, but tonight she was still excited.
Beast in View is a 1955 psychological suspense thriller that has been adapted for television and was on the list of The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time. It centers around a psychotic person who uses phone calls to cause others emotional distress for revenge.
A wealthy young recluse, Helen Clarvoe, received a creepy phone call from someone who claimed to know her and saw in their crystal ball that an accident would befall her. The stranger on the phone said her name was Evelyn Merrick. Soon after the call ended, Helen fell striking her face on a table. Bloody and frightened, she contacted her broker and long-time family friend for advice. Then, she convinced Mr. Blackshear to play amateur gumshoe, find this woman, and discover the basis for the call.
The premise and cover design captured my attention. And after a strong start, I thought it would be a pager turner. I enjoyed reading about Blackshear’s investigation the most. However, it became increasingly predictable the more I read. Too bad I suspected the conclusion by the midpoint. Once I knew the game, there wasn’t anything left to hold my interest. Disappointingly, the details behind the psychosis were left vague.
I had some reasons for the 3-star rating. Characterization was one-dimensional. The writing had time jumps and sudden speaker shifts which caused me to reread sections. Blackshear, who had an avuncular relationship with Helen from the beginning, suddenly fancied himself wanting to date her. (He said she would need to upgrade her wardrobe before they went out.) This declaration came out of nowhere and only lasted one page. Additionally, prejudice against a variety of groups was present. However, gay males had the greatest focus.
Overall, it was a mediocre story told in third person with an unreliable narrator. Not a book I would expect to have made a top list. I found elements in this book comparable to a recent read, Mrs. March. Unfortunately, that one didn’t work for me either. Both books had a strong beginning that I wished continued to the end. So, if you liked Mrs. March, you may like this one too.
CW:
Beast in View is a 1955 psychological suspense thriller that has been adapted for television and was on the list of The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time. It centers around a psychotic person who uses phone calls to cause others emotional distress for revenge.
A wealthy young recluse, Helen Clarvoe, received a creepy phone call from someone who claimed to know her and saw in their crystal ball that an accident would befall her. The stranger on the phone said her name was Evelyn Merrick. Soon after the call ended, Helen fell striking her face on a table. Bloody and frightened, she contacted her broker and long-time family friend for advice. Then, she convinced Mr. Blackshear to play amateur gumshoe, find this woman, and discover the basis for the call.
The premise and cover design captured my attention. And after a strong start, I thought it would be a pager turner. I enjoyed reading about Blackshear’s investigation the most. However, it became increasingly predictable the more I read. Too bad I suspected the conclusion by the midpoint. Once I knew the game, there wasn’t anything left to hold my interest. Disappointingly, the details behind the psychosis were left vague.
I had some reasons for the 3-star rating. Characterization was one-dimensional. The writing had time jumps and sudden speaker shifts which caused me to reread sections. Blackshear, who had an avuncular relationship with Helen from the beginning, suddenly fancied himself wanting to date her. (He said she would need to upgrade her wardrobe before they went out.) This declaration came out of nowhere and only lasted one page. Additionally, prejudice against a variety of groups was present. However, gay males had the greatest focus.
Overall, it was a mediocre story told in third person with an unreliable narrator. Not a book I would expect to have made a top list. I found elements in this book comparable to a recent read, Mrs. March. Unfortunately, that one didn’t work for me either. Both books had a strong beginning that I wished continued to the end. So, if you liked Mrs. March, you may like this one too.
CW:
October 7, 2012
Like a 3.75 rounded up. My first, but not last, novel by Margaret Millar, Beast in View is really more of a story of psychological suspense rather than a full-blown crime novel, set in Southern California of the 1950s.
Helen Clarvoe, a young woman now 30, lives alone in a small hotel in Hollywood. Her mother, with whom she only rarely communicates by mail, lives six miles away with her brother Douglas. Helen lived there in a self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world, "behind her wall of money and the iron bars of her egotism," never going out to see much of the world, although because of prudent investments, she certainly could have. She receives a phone call one day and the woman at the other end of the line claimed to one of her friends, calling herself Evelyn Merrick. As Helen listens, she is convinced the caller is mad, although the caller disagrees -- telling Helen that in fact, she is the one who is mad, calling her a "little coward," accusing her of being jealous, and saying that she can see everything about Helen in her crystal ball. After questioning the switchboard operator about the incoming call, Helen gets in contact with her family's former investment counselor, Mr. Blackshear, who comes to the hotel to meet with her. She talks to him about the call, then shows him a money clip which was missing quite a huge sum of cash, and explains that she feared that her caller, Evelyn Merrick, may have been the one who stole it. She wants Blackshear to find Merrick. The only clue that the caller left in her conversation with Helen was that someday she planned to be "immortal," that "her body would be in every art museum in the country." With that small hint in mind, Blackshear sets off on his quest in full-on private-investigator mode and begins to hear much more about Evelyn Merrick. Her forté, it seems, lies in discovering other people's deep-seated insecurities and using her knowledge to provoke her victims into a state of gut-wrenching despair,leaving a trail of desperation and devastation behind her as she goes. The story develops through the points of view of different characters, and through them Blackshear ultimately discovers a slowly-unfolding panorama of long-kept, long-buried secrets relevant to his investigations.
What comes out of this case goes far beyond the stuff of normal crime fare, as Millar takes her readers into middle-class Los Angeles of the 1950s, a place of societal constraints and, especially for this cast of characters, a number of unfulfilled expectations that have, over the years, remained dormant until finally germinating into crushing disappointments. Furthermore, while the central character, Helen Clarvoe, is a loner, Beast in View is a novel with a profound emphasis on human interactions and human failings at its core. While many reviews I've read have noted that the solution was easily grasped from the outset, I didn't figure it out until the end when all was revealed, and decided that I liked being artfully manipulated by the author throughout the entire story.
Don't let its age fool you. Beast in View is very dark, almost noirish in tone, and probes deeply into the human psyche, in many ways much more realistically than many modern offerings. This book will not be the last of Margaret Millar for me. Highly recommended, but beware -- there is little in the way of happiness to be found in the entire novel.
Helen Clarvoe, a young woman now 30, lives alone in a small hotel in Hollywood. Her mother, with whom she only rarely communicates by mail, lives six miles away with her brother Douglas. Helen lived there in a self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world, "behind her wall of money and the iron bars of her egotism," never going out to see much of the world, although because of prudent investments, she certainly could have. She receives a phone call one day and the woman at the other end of the line claimed to one of her friends, calling herself Evelyn Merrick. As Helen listens, she is convinced the caller is mad, although the caller disagrees -- telling Helen that in fact, she is the one who is mad, calling her a "little coward," accusing her of being jealous, and saying that she can see everything about Helen in her crystal ball. After questioning the switchboard operator about the incoming call, Helen gets in contact with her family's former investment counselor, Mr. Blackshear, who comes to the hotel to meet with her. She talks to him about the call, then shows him a money clip which was missing quite a huge sum of cash, and explains that she feared that her caller, Evelyn Merrick, may have been the one who stole it. She wants Blackshear to find Merrick. The only clue that the caller left in her conversation with Helen was that someday she planned to be "immortal," that "her body would be in every art museum in the country." With that small hint in mind, Blackshear sets off on his quest in full-on private-investigator mode and begins to hear much more about Evelyn Merrick. Her forté, it seems, lies in discovering other people's deep-seated insecurities and using her knowledge to provoke her victims into a state of gut-wrenching despair,leaving a trail of desperation and devastation behind her as she goes. The story develops through the points of view of different characters, and through them Blackshear ultimately discovers a slowly-unfolding panorama of long-kept, long-buried secrets relevant to his investigations.
What comes out of this case goes far beyond the stuff of normal crime fare, as Millar takes her readers into middle-class Los Angeles of the 1950s, a place of societal constraints and, especially for this cast of characters, a number of unfulfilled expectations that have, over the years, remained dormant until finally germinating into crushing disappointments. Furthermore, while the central character, Helen Clarvoe, is a loner, Beast in View is a novel with a profound emphasis on human interactions and human failings at its core. While many reviews I've read have noted that the solution was easily grasped from the outset, I didn't figure it out until the end when all was revealed, and decided that I liked being artfully manipulated by the author throughout the entire story.
Don't let its age fool you. Beast in View is very dark, almost noirish in tone, and probes deeply into the human psyche, in many ways much more realistically than many modern offerings. This book will not be the last of Margaret Millar for me. Highly recommended, but beware -- there is little in the way of happiness to be found in the entire novel.
March 26, 2019
This tautly written Edgar-winning mystery novel, published at or near the zenith of Millar's career, features a young women terrorizing others through the power of words, and no I'm not talking about the author. How good was Millar? Her husband Kenneth Millar changed his pen name in 1949 to Ross Macdonald in order to avoid any confusion with his wife.
November 19, 2020
Una historia bastante entretenida y corta, aunque no necesitaba más páginas para la narración. Me ha gustado el estilo directo de la autora, sin descripciones superfluas, personajes de los más variado y una historia bastante interesante y un con final inesperado. Eso si, se le nota que no es una novela actual, pero no le quita nada de originalidad ni encanto. La recomiendo!
October 20, 2022
Helen is a rich recluse living alone in a hotel room when she receives a phone call from a woman, Evelyn Merrick, who claims to be an acquaintance of hers from way back. Ms. Merrick then forewarns Helen that she will soon be in a terrible accident. Merrick is to become her stalker, and on Helen’s request, Paul Blacksheer, her financial advisor, begins to search for the threatening woman before something bad happens. An intriguing noir in which everything is not quite what it seems , including an ending that surprises, though probably not half as much as it must have done in 1956. While reading, I was not always clear what was going on with all the red herrings, but my confusion was cleared up by the end. Most surprising, it was only much later that I began to realize how clever a novel it is.
July 18, 2021
Ross Macdonald is considered one of the best American crime writers. He actually changed his name from Kenneth Millar to avoid comparisons with his wife Margaret Millar. So I had been interested in Millar and Beast in View was an obvious choice because it won an Edgar award for best novel. Critical consensus has been revised, the husband now trumps wife in praise, appeal and longevity. But it is easy to see why Macdonald felt compelled to adopt a new pen name, Millar could write as well as him.
Lean and mean at just 150 pages, this dives headlong into an interesting plot and never lets up. Like Dorothy B. Hughes, Millar wrote excellent psychological suspense and had a knack of sizing up characters in just a few lines. She existed by, for, and unto herself, shut off from the world by a wall of money and the iron bars of her egotism. She is Helen Clarvoe, reclusive neurotic running from her toxic family. She gets a call on the first page from a forgotten acquaintance Evelyn Merrick and it scares her. Merrick’s favorite habit is pushing buttons to see how far she can drive people. She is unfalteringly polite and unbelievably vicious. She combines insecurities and truth in neat little packages and uses honesty to humiliate. As the plot drew me in, and Millar wrote chapters from her perspective, it is obvious she is unhinged. Millar shows it cleverly. Merrick describes herself as like a child in a playhouse or a poet in an ivory tower except a couple of lines later her internal monologue gets confused the poet in the playhouse, the child in the ivory tower.
Helen asks her father’s old friend Paul Blackshear to check out Merrick for her. Bored Blackshear, a financial consultant proves to be a good amateur detective but his attitude towards Helen changes too quickly in a matter of days from derisive pity to genuine concern. Some of the pop psychology is dated but it never makes any pretense at being anything other than pulp, so I did not mind. A much better approach than modern psychological thrillers which are usually more stupid and don’t have prose this rich or interesting but takes themselves a lot more seriously.
The minor characters are equally interesting, almost as good as Macdonald. The couple’s writing styles are similar maybe they were each other’s critique partners. Helen’s narcissistic mother is a work of art and the dialogue bites. See this reaction to a suicide attempt. He could never finish anything properly, not even himself. There is a lot of focus on Helen’s isolation, so more background on her relationship with her mother would have been nicer. The cynicism, the breakneck pacing, the seediness, the loneliness and everything else that makes classic pulp fiction coveted can be found here. Maybe not a lot of substance but surely a brilliant exercise in style. Rating – 4/5
Quotes: lonely rich ladies desiring to be richer in order to take the curse off their loneliness
I’m a sucker for dying mothers, just so’s they don’t change their minds and stay alive, like mine did.
she had a whole closetful of punctured dreams, but there was always room for one more.
Lean and mean at just 150 pages, this dives headlong into an interesting plot and never lets up. Like Dorothy B. Hughes, Millar wrote excellent psychological suspense and had a knack of sizing up characters in just a few lines. She existed by, for, and unto herself, shut off from the world by a wall of money and the iron bars of her egotism. She is Helen Clarvoe, reclusive neurotic running from her toxic family. She gets a call on the first page from a forgotten acquaintance Evelyn Merrick and it scares her. Merrick’s favorite habit is pushing buttons to see how far she can drive people. She is unfalteringly polite and unbelievably vicious. She combines insecurities and truth in neat little packages and uses honesty to humiliate. As the plot drew me in, and Millar wrote chapters from her perspective, it is obvious she is unhinged. Millar shows it cleverly. Merrick describes herself as like a child in a playhouse or a poet in an ivory tower except a couple of lines later her internal monologue gets confused the poet in the playhouse, the child in the ivory tower.
Helen asks her father’s old friend Paul Blackshear to check out Merrick for her. Bored Blackshear, a financial consultant proves to be a good amateur detective but his attitude towards Helen changes too quickly in a matter of days from derisive pity to genuine concern. Some of the pop psychology is dated but it never makes any pretense at being anything other than pulp, so I did not mind. A much better approach than modern psychological thrillers which are usually more stupid and don’t have prose this rich or interesting but takes themselves a lot more seriously.
The minor characters are equally interesting, almost as good as Macdonald. The couple’s writing styles are similar maybe they were each other’s critique partners. Helen’s narcissistic mother is a work of art and the dialogue bites. See this reaction to a suicide attempt. He could never finish anything properly, not even himself. There is a lot of focus on Helen’s isolation, so more background on her relationship with her mother would have been nicer. The cynicism, the breakneck pacing, the seediness, the loneliness and everything else that makes classic pulp fiction coveted can be found here. Maybe not a lot of substance but surely a brilliant exercise in style. Rating – 4/5
Quotes: lonely rich ladies desiring to be richer in order to take the curse off their loneliness
I’m a sucker for dying mothers, just so’s they don’t change their minds and stay alive, like mine did.
she had a whole closetful of punctured dreams, but there was always room for one more.
March 20, 2016
Margaret Millar was a Canadian writer known for her marriage to Ross MacDonald one of the most well respected mystery writers of all time. However don't fall into the trap of thinking she married a prominent mystery writer, adored him, and lived contentedly in his shadow. Margaret did not need to stand in any body's shadow when it came to writing suspense novels. She was a force. Think of Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell and you have female mystery writers who wrote in a similar vein and share similar skills.
With Margaret Millar there is always two stories going on, the one she lets you view and the one underneath that you know is lurking, never completely clear but waiting to spring and catch you unaware. When you read her novels you feel just a bit uneasy, it's like being up late at night and hearing a strange noise, your senses suddenly prickly and alert. You know something is going on, but what? You want to dismiss it but can you? She is the master of the unexpected twist and even though you know it's coming, it still gets you in the end.
This was her first book and it won an Edgar. She never won another Edgar which is a pity because she wrote a lot of brilliant books, but then, Ross MacDonald never won an Edgar and he has proven to be one of the great mystery writers of all time. Me? I love Ross MacDonald's writings but sometimes I question whether his wife was the better.
With Margaret Millar there is always two stories going on, the one she lets you view and the one underneath that you know is lurking, never completely clear but waiting to spring and catch you unaware. When you read her novels you feel just a bit uneasy, it's like being up late at night and hearing a strange noise, your senses suddenly prickly and alert. You know something is going on, but what? You want to dismiss it but can you? She is the master of the unexpected twist and even though you know it's coming, it still gets you in the end.
This was her first book and it won an Edgar. She never won another Edgar which is a pity because she wrote a lot of brilliant books, but then, Ross MacDonald never won an Edgar and he has proven to be one of the great mystery writers of all time. Me? I love Ross MacDonald's writings but sometimes I question whether his wife was the better.
March 30, 2010
Don't let the quaint 1950s setting and dated social attitudes mislead you. This is a first-rate psychological suspense mystery. Devastating climax helps to make it MM's masterpiece. Won the Edgar in 1956.
January 17, 2018
Soho Syndicate is in the process of re-publishing many of Margaret Millar’s suspense novels. Millar was a renowned, award-winning suspense novelist of the fifties. Interestingly, her husband is better known by his pen name, Ross MacDonald. Truly, a literary power couple.
Beast in View is a rather short novel, even by mid-fifties standards. It has an unusual feel to it of distance and detachment and has been described as a psychological suspense novel.
I don’t know if it’s typical of Millar’s writing, but, more than being a crime thriller, it seems to poke a bit of fun at the Santa Barbara/Beverly Hills upper crust, finding many of those folks merely actors playing their chosen parts. Many of the characters are oddballs from 30 year old shut-ins, to widows living off quickly disappearing inheritances, to wanna-be Actresses desperate for fame, to closet homosexuals (outcasts at that time) living with their mothers and taking endless photography classes. There’s a real sense of awkwardness and uncomfortableness with all these characters.
Beast in View is a rather short novel, even by mid-fifties standards. It has an unusual feel to it of distance and detachment and has been described as a psychological suspense novel.
I don’t know if it’s typical of Millar’s writing, but, more than being a crime thriller, it seems to poke a bit of fun at the Santa Barbara/Beverly Hills upper crust, finding many of those folks merely actors playing their chosen parts. Many of the characters are oddballs from 30 year old shut-ins, to widows living off quickly disappearing inheritances, to wanna-be Actresses desperate for fame, to closet homosexuals (outcasts at that time) living with their mothers and taking endless photography classes. There’s a real sense of awkwardness and uncomfortableness with all these characters.
August 2, 2022
Blackshear better watch out or he might end up with a pair of barbers’ shears stuck in the base of his throat. Blackshear's business is stocks and bonds, not psychoses. He reluctantly agrees to help his client, a lonely rich lady, find a woman who is stalking and terrorizing her. He uncovers a nest of SoCal degeneracy. But the psycho-stalker is always one step ahead.
"Poor old bungling Blackshear, looking for her all over town, like a blind man feeling his way through a forest. One of these days I will pop out at him from behind a tree."Millar's writing is uncluttered, suspenseful, and vivid:
"A trickle of sweat oozed down the side of Blackshear’s face, leaving a bright moist trail like a slug."
March 26, 2024
The Beast In View
Margaret Millar's 1955 novel, "Beast in View" is the third of four novels included in a new Library of America anthology, "Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1950s". The LOA book is part of a two-volume box set with the first book including four novels by women crime writers from the 1940s. Sarah Weinman, an authority on women's suspense fiction selected the contents and edited both volumes.
"Beast in View", the title of a poem by Muriel Rukeyser, refers in Millar's novel not to an animal seen on the outside but to the self. Although crime has a large role in the book, the primary theme is internal and psychological, about anger, alienation, and loneliness. Set in 1950s Los Angeles, virtually every character in the book suffers from being alone and from loss. The novel begins with a lonely, wealthy spinster, Helen Clarvoe, 30, receiving a mysterious threatening call from a woman who identifies herself as Evelyn Merrick, an old friend. Helen is frightened and turns to the only person she remotely trusts, her investment advisor, Paul Blackshear, 50. Blackshear is a widower, semi-retired, and fearful of how he will fill the hours of his retirement. He agrees to help Helen find the woman who harassed her. The search takes Blackshear and the reader through seedy bars, pornographic photography studios, and into Helen Clarvoe's dysfunctional family. The book takes its characters through dark alleys filled with feral cats, through cold streets and into massage parlors and brothels. The book shows frigidity, harsh judgmentalism, and, as thought of under the mores of the time, sexual perversion. The novel gradually descends into a world of suicide, murder, and madness. Millar writes with great detail and perception about her characters, both major and minor, with psychological insight and descriptions of place filling every page. The novel is a disturbing book about the mysteries of the heart and about the consequences of the lack of love that enables it to rise above the genre of suspense fiction.
The LOA volume includes a biographical sketch of the author. Millar (1915 -- 1994) was born in Canada but lived most of her life in the United States. She studied ancient Greek and the classics in college but soon turned to the writing of suspense fiction. Millar received the Edgar Award for best mystery novel for "Beast in View" and was named Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America in 1983. Millar's husband, Kenneth Millar, also was a celebrated author of suspense fiction under the penname Ross MacDonald. The LOA has published two volumes of MacDonald's novels.
Millar's novel, which currently is out-of-print as an individual volume in the United States, explores dark places and deserves to be made accessible and read. The LOA and Weinman have done a service by including "Beast in View" in their anthology of women's suspense writing. The LOA has kindly provided me with a review copy of its two-volume box set. I have enjoyed learning about Millar and about the other authors included in the collection.
Robin Friedman
Margaret Millar's 1955 novel, "Beast in View" is the third of four novels included in a new Library of America anthology, "Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1950s". The LOA book is part of a two-volume box set with the first book including four novels by women crime writers from the 1940s. Sarah Weinman, an authority on women's suspense fiction selected the contents and edited both volumes.
"Beast in View", the title of a poem by Muriel Rukeyser, refers in Millar's novel not to an animal seen on the outside but to the self. Although crime has a large role in the book, the primary theme is internal and psychological, about anger, alienation, and loneliness. Set in 1950s Los Angeles, virtually every character in the book suffers from being alone and from loss. The novel begins with a lonely, wealthy spinster, Helen Clarvoe, 30, receiving a mysterious threatening call from a woman who identifies herself as Evelyn Merrick, an old friend. Helen is frightened and turns to the only person she remotely trusts, her investment advisor, Paul Blackshear, 50. Blackshear is a widower, semi-retired, and fearful of how he will fill the hours of his retirement. He agrees to help Helen find the woman who harassed her. The search takes Blackshear and the reader through seedy bars, pornographic photography studios, and into Helen Clarvoe's dysfunctional family. The book takes its characters through dark alleys filled with feral cats, through cold streets and into massage parlors and brothels. The book shows frigidity, harsh judgmentalism, and, as thought of under the mores of the time, sexual perversion. The novel gradually descends into a world of suicide, murder, and madness. Millar writes with great detail and perception about her characters, both major and minor, with psychological insight and descriptions of place filling every page. The novel is a disturbing book about the mysteries of the heart and about the consequences of the lack of love that enables it to rise above the genre of suspense fiction.
The LOA volume includes a biographical sketch of the author. Millar (1915 -- 1994) was born in Canada but lived most of her life in the United States. She studied ancient Greek and the classics in college but soon turned to the writing of suspense fiction. Millar received the Edgar Award for best mystery novel for "Beast in View" and was named Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America in 1983. Millar's husband, Kenneth Millar, also was a celebrated author of suspense fiction under the penname Ross MacDonald. The LOA has published two volumes of MacDonald's novels.
Millar's novel, which currently is out-of-print as an individual volume in the United States, explores dark places and deserves to be made accessible and read. The LOA and Weinman have done a service by including "Beast in View" in their anthology of women's suspense writing. The LOA has kindly provided me with a review copy of its two-volume box set. I have enjoyed learning about Millar and about the other authors included in the collection.
Robin Friedman
October 28, 2021
This short psychological thriller is hard to put down. With frightening phone calls, a woman terrorizes people who have slighted her in the past. "Beast in View" is a suspenseful classic from 1955.
December 24, 2020
The book opens with a phone call that in this day and age we would describe as coming from a stalker. Published in 1955, I don't think the term had yet been invented, but that is what immediately came to mind. Helen Clarvoe had become sort of reclusive and getting a call from an unknown was more than a bit unsettling. This is short enough that, even as slow a reader as I am, I managed to read it in just a few hours and telling more would wander into spoiler territory. Others would make a quick afternoon of it.
This is simply superb psychological fiction. I must not travel in the right circles as Millar has come to my attention only fairly recently. Certainly she is in the same league as Patricia Highsmith. I see Vera Caspary on her GR "similar" authors link. Dorothy B. Hughes should be there. These are all women writing dark psychological fiction at more or less the same time.
Beast In View was awarded the Edgar for Best Novel in 1956. It gets a very rare 5-star award from me.
This is simply superb psychological fiction. I must not travel in the right circles as Millar has come to my attention only fairly recently. Certainly she is in the same league as Patricia Highsmith. I see Vera Caspary on her GR "similar" authors link. Dorothy B. Hughes should be there. These are all women writing dark psychological fiction at more or less the same time.
Beast In View was awarded the Edgar for Best Novel in 1956. It gets a very rare 5-star award from me.
March 16, 2022
Beast In View was a true gem. I've enjoyed a couple of her other books in the past few years, when I've been able to find copies. The Soft Talkers was one of my favourites of last year. Beast in View is another 5-star read. It's such an interesting story. I love how Millar develops her plots. Is it about Helen Clarvoe, who lives alone in her apartment, isolated from the world about her? Is it about Mr. Blackshear, Helen's financial adviser, bored with his work, who she asks to help her find the woman who made the distressing call to Helen and who begins to conduct an investigation on Helen's behalf? Or is it about Evelyn Merrick, the woman who makes the initial call to Helen and who seems to be making many calls to other people that have upset her? I loved how it moved along, from the one character to the other, how the tension builds, how the story surprisingly makes a turn to the left. Excellent, excellent!! She is such a wonderful writer.
August 28, 2014
An absolute masterpiece, they should stick this in some sort of series of masterpieces of crime...
...oh yeah - "Crime Masterworks" - they did it already.
So not surprisingly this was a brilliant work. It was deeply dark in a elegantly sinister way that not so much stabs you in the back but convinces you that you need to stab yourself in the back. The perpetrator leaves no evidence and does nothing criminal but drives their victims to destruction in such a way as to make the evil undeniable.
The range of characters and relationships is rich, varied, imaginative and real; pulling the character's fears into our own with its authenticity. We ask ourselves what would we do in that situation and the answer, like the rest of the story is dark.
The plot was just as organic and delicate as the characters it involved, seeming at times episodic but never detaching from the central investigation. But this is a story that gets into your heart rather than your head and focuses on the why rather than the how.
And as for the finale, the final reveal... EPIC! I was left satisfied and empty at the same time, knowing I would not have another ending as good for a while.
...oh yeah - "Crime Masterworks" - they did it already.
So not surprisingly this was a brilliant work. It was deeply dark in a elegantly sinister way that not so much stabs you in the back but convinces you that you need to stab yourself in the back. The perpetrator leaves no evidence and does nothing criminal but drives their victims to destruction in such a way as to make the evil undeniable.
The range of characters and relationships is rich, varied, imaginative and real; pulling the character's fears into our own with its authenticity. We ask ourselves what would we do in that situation and the answer, like the rest of the story is dark.
The plot was just as organic and delicate as the characters it involved, seeming at times episodic but never detaching from the central investigation. But this is a story that gets into your heart rather than your head and focuses on the why rather than the how.
And as for the finale, the final reveal... EPIC! I was left satisfied and empty at the same time, knowing I would not have another ending as good for a while.
November 18, 2020
Esta es una novela clásica de intriga, entretenida, corta, de lectura ágil y narrrada de forma sencilla, que hace que se avance muy rápido al leerla.
Todo comienza cuando Helen Clarvoe recibe una llamada de teléfono que la inquieta de quién dice ser una antigua amiga suya, Evelyn Merritt y entonces Helen le pide a su amigo Paul Blackshear que investigue a esa mujer.
Toda la trama se centra practicamente en la investigación de Blackshear, y en saber que ocurre, todo apunta hacia una historia de venganza.... por eso,cuando he llegado al final no me esperababa lo que me he encontrado.
Todo comienza cuando Helen Clarvoe recibe una llamada de teléfono que la inquieta de quién dice ser una antigua amiga suya, Evelyn Merritt y entonces Helen le pide a su amigo Paul Blackshear que investigue a esa mujer.
Toda la trama se centra practicamente en la investigación de Blackshear, y en saber que ocurre, todo apunta hacia una historia de venganza.... por eso,cuando he llegado al final no me esperababa lo que me he encontrado.
January 7, 2025
Titulo: La bestia se acerca
Autor: Margaret Millar
Motivo de lectura: #RetoPremios2024
Lectura / Relectura: Lectura
Fisico / Electronico: Electronico
Mi edicion: -
Puntuacion: 3/5
Una mujer desesperada, el acoso telefonico y una carrera contra el tiempo.
Definitivamente esto es un thriller psicológico que en su momento simplemente fue llamado "misterio".
Es muy difícil reseñar este libro, porque siento que cada punto que quiero destacar, seria un posible spoiler del plot twist.
Una novella escrita en el año 1955 la cual me sorprendió abordando un tema de salud mental (si lo hicieron mal o bien, eso ya sería otra discusión), pero el hecho de que al menos hubo un intento de abordaje me parece destacable.
Hubo partes que me entretuvo, que tenia ganas de saber que pasaria despues, pero luego siento que la historia se va por las ramas, como si la autora tuviera un estilo un poco oscilante.
Autor: Margaret Millar
Motivo de lectura: #RetoPremios2024
Lectura / Relectura: Lectura
Fisico / Electronico: Electronico
Mi edicion: -
Puntuacion: 3/5
Una mujer desesperada, el acoso telefonico y una carrera contra el tiempo.
Definitivamente esto es un thriller psicológico que en su momento simplemente fue llamado "misterio".
Es muy difícil reseñar este libro, porque siento que cada punto que quiero destacar, seria un posible spoiler del plot twist.
Una novella escrita en el año 1955 la cual me sorprendió abordando un tema de salud mental (si lo hicieron mal o bien, eso ya sería otra discusión), pero el hecho de que al menos hubo un intento de abordaje me parece destacable.
Hubo partes que me entretuvo, que tenia ganas de saber que pasaria despues, pero luego siento que la historia se va por las ramas, como si la autora tuviera un estilo un poco oscilante.
April 10, 2024
Beast in View is about a rich young woman receiving sinister phone calls from someone who claims to be a friend from her past. She asks for help from a family broker to investigate and what follows is an unleashed torrent of family secrets that ends in no less than a few murders. A deeply psychological novel, author Margaret Millar examines the dark, latent desires in her troubled characters.
Which of course, leads to treating some subject material in ways that in modern times are socially unacceptable or at least frowned upon. But if you can get over that meagre hurdle you are treated to a nasty, sordid little bit of a mystery. A fun read.
Which of course, leads to treating some subject material in ways that in modern times are socially unacceptable or at least frowned upon. But if you can get over that meagre hurdle you are treated to a nasty, sordid little bit of a mystery. A fun read.
March 12, 2023
Mnogo manjkavosti u priči ali trojka jer je ovo psihološki triler u začetku svog žanra, danas tako popularnog, a vjerujem da je Margaret Millar mnogim piscima poslužila kao inspiracija.
February 11, 2019
TL;DR: 4-4.5 stars. An very enjoyable psychological thriller tarnished a bit by 1950s psychological ideas and handling of a gay character.
I have been aware of Margaret Millar for years, largely from Tom Nolan's excellent biography of her husband, one of my favorite authors, Ross Macdonald. (Real name Kenneth Millar.) I had never, until now, actually read any of her work. That error has now been corrected, and I'm excited to see at least 14 of her novels are currently available on kindle and several more scheduled to be reissued this year.
Margaret Millar was quite a successful mystery and suspense novelist in her own right, publishing her first novel in 1941, three years before Macdonald's first in 1944.
I happened to have this lying around as part of Library of America's Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s: A Library of America Boxed Set, when I was looking for an escape from another book I was reading and chanced to see a review of her Vanish in an Instant cross my GR dash.
I took a peek and was hooked from the opening lines:
The voice was quiet, smiling. “Is that Miss Clarvoe?”
“Yes.”
“You know who this is?”
“No.”
“A friend.”
“I have a great many friends,” Miss Clarvoe lied. In the mirror above the telephone stand she saw her mouth repeating the lie, enjoying it, and she saw her head nod in quick affirmation—this lie is true, yes, this is a very true lie. Only her eyes refused to be convinced. Embarrassed, they blinked and glanced away.
Helen Clarvoe, a reculsive, isolated woman, estranged from her mother and brother, ends up turning to her late father's investment advisor, Paul Blackshear for help in the wake of this threatening phone call. Blackshear ends up investigating more out of boredom (he is semi-retired) than anything else. Things escalate.
I don't want to give much away. It's a short book, 148 pages in the LoA collection I have. One of my few real critiques is that the handling of point of view is a bit unusual and I'm not sure what Millar was intending to accomplish with it. It's mostly third person omniscient style, but slips into first now and then.
LGBT: There are some gay male characters, and I was not thrilled with the handling of the main one. There's also an implied lesbian or bisexual woman on page toward the end. I don't get the impression the author's handling of the primary gay character was intended to be unsympathetic or dehumanizing, but 50s attitudes and psychological ideas about homosexuality were not exactly enlightened. (Nolan's biography notes the author's husband Kenneth Millar had multiple homosexual experiences as a teenager, and I'd love to know if and how that influenced Millar and Macdonald's portrayal of gay characters.)
1950s Psychology: Beyond attitudes toward the gay character, the main plot leans heavily on some rather outdated psychological ideas, so that could be a potential deal breaker for readers who can't accept a book which depends on wrongheaded psychology.
In the end, I enjoyed this a lot despite it's flaws. This broke a streak of pretty bad books for me, and I will definitely be buying a bunch more of Margaret Millar's work in the near future.
I have been aware of Margaret Millar for years, largely from Tom Nolan's excellent biography of her husband, one of my favorite authors, Ross Macdonald. (Real name Kenneth Millar.) I had never, until now, actually read any of her work. That error has now been corrected, and I'm excited to see at least 14 of her novels are currently available on kindle and several more scheduled to be reissued this year.
Margaret Millar was quite a successful mystery and suspense novelist in her own right, publishing her first novel in 1941, three years before Macdonald's first in 1944.
I happened to have this lying around as part of Library of America's Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s: A Library of America Boxed Set, when I was looking for an escape from another book I was reading and chanced to see a review of her Vanish in an Instant cross my GR dash.
I took a peek and was hooked from the opening lines:
The voice was quiet, smiling. “Is that Miss Clarvoe?”
“Yes.”
“You know who this is?”
“No.”
“A friend.”
“I have a great many friends,” Miss Clarvoe lied. In the mirror above the telephone stand she saw her mouth repeating the lie, enjoying it, and she saw her head nod in quick affirmation—this lie is true, yes, this is a very true lie. Only her eyes refused to be convinced. Embarrassed, they blinked and glanced away.
Helen Clarvoe, a reculsive, isolated woman, estranged from her mother and brother, ends up turning to her late father's investment advisor, Paul Blackshear for help in the wake of this threatening phone call. Blackshear ends up investigating more out of boredom (he is semi-retired) than anything else. Things escalate.
I don't want to give much away. It's a short book, 148 pages in the LoA collection I have. One of my few real critiques is that the handling of point of view is a bit unusual and I'm not sure what Millar was intending to accomplish with it. It's mostly third person omniscient style, but slips into first now and then.
LGBT: There are some gay male characters, and I was not thrilled with the handling of the main one. There's also an implied lesbian or bisexual woman on page toward the end. I don't get the impression the author's handling of the primary gay character was intended to be unsympathetic or dehumanizing, but 50s attitudes and psychological ideas about homosexuality were not exactly enlightened. (Nolan's biography notes the author's husband Kenneth Millar had multiple homosexual experiences as a teenager, and I'd love to know if and how that influenced Millar and Macdonald's portrayal of gay characters.)
1950s Psychology: Beyond attitudes toward the gay character, the main plot leans heavily on some rather outdated psychological ideas, so that could be a potential deal breaker for readers who can't accept a book which depends on wrongheaded psychology.
In the end, I enjoyed this a lot despite it's flaws. This broke a streak of pretty bad books for me, and I will definitely be buying a bunch more of Margaret Millar's work in the near future.
June 10, 2019
COUNTDOWN: Mid-20th Century North American Crime
BOOK 221 (of 250)
I've been looking forward to reading this book, as I knew it had won an Edgar for "Mystery of the Year" in a year (1955) that also included the publication of Patricia Highsmith's brilliant "The Talented Mr. Ripley." I always try to be objective, and will try here.
HOOK - 4: Here are the first 7 lines:
>>>The voice was quiet, smiling. "Is that Miss Clarvoe?"
>>>"Yes."
>>>"You know who this is?"
>>>"No."
>>>"A friend."
>>>"I have a great many friends," Miss Clarvoe lied.
>>>In the mirror above the telephone stand she saw her mouth repeating the lie, enjoying it....
This is an ominous opening: we soon learn that Miss Clarvoe has no friends, lives alone in a hotel on a small inheritance, enough to live on but not luxuriously. And she has a stalker. I found this opening original as 1) it is not a cliched and lazy weather report and 2) it isn't a Private Investigator meeting a client and 3) it isn't a crime (a robbery, a bloody body on a floor, a busted up body at the bottom of a staircase). I like the originality of the opening and it offers to us hints of things to come.
PACE -2: Not a one-sit read, and not a book that one "can't wait to get back to". I was never enthralled, never eager to get back to it. In fact, I'd have been fine never reading it because...
PLOT - 1: ...there is an insane person running around killing people. Helen Clarvoe receives threatening calls, so she turns to her family's attorney, Mr. Blackshear. Things go from bad to worse, and when a man is found stabbed to death, Mr. Blackshear doesn't step back and let the cops do their job: strangely law officers and investigators are missing and it's Mr. Blackshear putting himself into very dangerous situations. Why? I kept waiting for an explanation such as one in which he has been embezzling money from the family and doesn't want cops looking closely, but no, there is no explanation. Helen is indeed a recluse and she feels Blackshear is the only person she can trust. But that's not good enough for me. Any sensible person would back away, as far away as possible, especially given that Helen might be the one who is the true nutcase. I read this a few days ago and I can't remember much of anything because of this massive and irritating plot hole ('Call the Cops and disappear, you idiot!' kept screaming in my head) and because of the characterization...
CHARACTERS - 1:...of an ill young man. It's 1955, and the brilliant Highsmith has us rooting for the bad guy (Ripley) who first and foremost is a con man, an impostor and a multiple murderer. (Along the sexual spectrum, Ripley leans toward men as his preferred partners but that's secondary to his character.) The gay folks portrayed in "Beast in View" are extremely unlikable, a mother (along with other characters) is horrified at the possibility her son is gay, when in truth she should be concerned about his overall mental stability, being gay the least of his 'issues'. But that's all the mother can see: she doesn't notice that her son is lazy, and rude, and unable to actually complete anything he starts (he'd probably be classified as having PTSD today, but still) and often disappears for lengthy periods of time, especially to avoid his mother's friends and guests. He is shy, distrustful, introverted and places his trust in an 'artist' of very questionable talent, as the artist basically creates and distributes seemingly soft core porn 'art' in the form of paintings and photos. His sexual preference shouldn't be at the top of his, or his mother's, or anyone's, concern. Evelyn Merrick, the caller on the first page, seems to be the perfect child, the absolutely perfect friend, the person Miss Clarvoe has always wanted to be. If the son hadn't been gay, just a shy, introverted, lazy, rude person, we'd have the exact same story. The son could have befriended the artist, agreed to study with him, even agree to pose for him, and, again, we would have the same story.
ATMOSPHERE - 3: The seclusion of Miss Clarvoe is nicely done. She wants to see no one, go no where, have her food delivered, and wants nothing to do with her family. The long, frantic phone calls from phone booths in bars are creepy. The villian just wants to ensure everyone has a bad day and believes he/she can be invigorated by "rays from the night" and believes he/she is waterproof. Yes, it's a creepy novel, that's true, and Megan Abbot says so in a blurb on the cover: "Deeply Creepy."
SUMMARY - My overall rating is 2.2. There are creepy scenes, there are red herrings all over the place. The denouement is simply lame. (I'll assume 60+ years ago the ending might have been a shocker). But, oh, an Edgar winner? That's the biggest mystery of this book. Didn't anyone voting read "Talented Mr. Ripley", a classic in the genre? It took over 40 years for "Ripley" to get to the screen and be accepted and liked, so perhaps some people were appalled that they liked Ripley so much. This mother/son dynamic in "Beast in View" reaches it's 'triumph' in Robert Bloch's novel "Psycho", but that was based on a true story. And "Psycho" works so beautifully (in book form and in film) because the sexuality of Norman Bates isn't at the forefront, his murderous tendencies are, though. In the real world, no one is "gay" and nothing else, and now I'll get off my soapbox.
BOOK 221 (of 250)
I've been looking forward to reading this book, as I knew it had won an Edgar for "Mystery of the Year" in a year (1955) that also included the publication of Patricia Highsmith's brilliant "The Talented Mr. Ripley." I always try to be objective, and will try here.
HOOK - 4: Here are the first 7 lines:
>>>The voice was quiet, smiling. "Is that Miss Clarvoe?"
>>>"Yes."
>>>"You know who this is?"
>>>"No."
>>>"A friend."
>>>"I have a great many friends," Miss Clarvoe lied.
>>>In the mirror above the telephone stand she saw her mouth repeating the lie, enjoying it....
This is an ominous opening: we soon learn that Miss Clarvoe has no friends, lives alone in a hotel on a small inheritance, enough to live on but not luxuriously. And she has a stalker. I found this opening original as 1) it is not a cliched and lazy weather report and 2) it isn't a Private Investigator meeting a client and 3) it isn't a crime (a robbery, a bloody body on a floor, a busted up body at the bottom of a staircase). I like the originality of the opening and it offers to us hints of things to come.
PACE -2: Not a one-sit read, and not a book that one "can't wait to get back to". I was never enthralled, never eager to get back to it. In fact, I'd have been fine never reading it because...
PLOT - 1: ...there is an insane person running around killing people. Helen Clarvoe receives threatening calls, so she turns to her family's attorney, Mr. Blackshear. Things go from bad to worse, and when a man is found stabbed to death, Mr. Blackshear doesn't step back and let the cops do their job: strangely law officers and investigators are missing and it's Mr. Blackshear putting himself into very dangerous situations. Why? I kept waiting for an explanation such as one in which he has been embezzling money from the family and doesn't want cops looking closely, but no, there is no explanation. Helen is indeed a recluse and she feels Blackshear is the only person she can trust. But that's not good enough for me. Any sensible person would back away, as far away as possible, especially given that Helen might be the one who is the true nutcase. I read this a few days ago and I can't remember much of anything because of this massive and irritating plot hole ('Call the Cops and disappear, you idiot!' kept screaming in my head) and because of the characterization...
CHARACTERS - 1:...of an ill young man. It's 1955, and the brilliant Highsmith has us rooting for the bad guy (Ripley) who first and foremost is a con man, an impostor and a multiple murderer. (Along the sexual spectrum, Ripley leans toward men as his preferred partners but that's secondary to his character.) The gay folks portrayed in "Beast in View" are extremely unlikable, a mother (along with other characters) is horrified at the possibility her son is gay, when in truth she should be concerned about his overall mental stability, being gay the least of his 'issues'. But that's all the mother can see: she doesn't notice that her son is lazy, and rude, and unable to actually complete anything he starts (he'd probably be classified as having PTSD today, but still) and often disappears for lengthy periods of time, especially to avoid his mother's friends and guests. He is shy, distrustful, introverted and places his trust in an 'artist' of very questionable talent, as the artist basically creates and distributes seemingly soft core porn 'art' in the form of paintings and photos. His sexual preference shouldn't be at the top of his, or his mother's, or anyone's, concern. Evelyn Merrick, the caller on the first page, seems to be the perfect child, the absolutely perfect friend, the person Miss Clarvoe has always wanted to be. If the son hadn't been gay, just a shy, introverted, lazy, rude person, we'd have the exact same story. The son could have befriended the artist, agreed to study with him, even agree to pose for him, and, again, we would have the same story.
ATMOSPHERE - 3: The seclusion of Miss Clarvoe is nicely done. She wants to see no one, go no where, have her food delivered, and wants nothing to do with her family. The long, frantic phone calls from phone booths in bars are creepy. The villian just wants to ensure everyone has a bad day and believes he/she can be invigorated by "rays from the night" and believes he/she is waterproof. Yes, it's a creepy novel, that's true, and Megan Abbot says so in a blurb on the cover: "Deeply Creepy."
SUMMARY - My overall rating is 2.2. There are creepy scenes, there are red herrings all over the place. The denouement is simply lame. (I'll assume 60+ years ago the ending might have been a shocker). But, oh, an Edgar winner? That's the biggest mystery of this book. Didn't anyone voting read "Talented Mr. Ripley", a classic in the genre? It took over 40 years for "Ripley" to get to the screen and be accepted and liked, so perhaps some people were appalled that they liked Ripley so much. This mother/son dynamic in "Beast in View" reaches it's 'triumph' in Robert Bloch's novel "Psycho", but that was based on a true story. And "Psycho" works so beautifully (in book form and in film) because the sexuality of Norman Bates isn't at the forefront, his murderous tendencies are, though. In the real world, no one is "gay" and nothing else, and now I'll get off my soapbox.
May 1, 2015
This is a very difficult review for me to write, perhaps the most difficult of the 300+ lame reviews I have produced so far. Margaret Millar's "Beast in View" received the "coveted" Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel of the year in 1956, yet I do not like it at all, and had to work hard to finish reading it. There must be something wrong with me.
Helen Clarvoe, a well-off, young, but lonely woman receives a nasty phone call from one Evelyn Merrick, who predicts that bad things will happen to Helen. Helen calls Mr. Blackshear, the family lawyer who manages her money, and asks him to find Ms. Merrick and make sure that she stops harassing her. Obviously, things do not go as planned; Ms. Merrick continues to call various people and tell dreadful things about people close to them. There is a murder and another death, and the reader gradually learns about events from the past.
My first gripe is minor and pertains to basic plausibility. Why would anyone believe words of a relative stranger? Suppose someone calls my wife and tells her that I committed some vile acts. My wife would laugh it off. While she knows that I am foolish, clumsy, lazy, conceited, and ... (well, let's talk about it some other time), she knows that I am not vile. Words are just words, most everybody lies every day, why then confuse something that someone says with reality? Sure, words can hurt, but not in that simple way.
Further, I am unable to relate to people who are so self-centered that their inability to align their real persona with their self-image, the fact that they are not someone who they would like to be, is the greatest tragedy of their life. Yes, it is a somewhat common human trait, but to me utterly uninteresting. I would rather read about why life is often hell for well-adjusted and well-meaning people, forced to be around each other. True, Ms. Millar introduces a thread where someone suffers because of societal norms and forces (by the way, that thread shows how dated the novel is, how much these norms have changed in the 60 years since the novel was published), yet there is too precious little of it, and we have to read instead about people's struggles with their self-perceived inadequacies.
What I can stand the least is the over-expressive style, bordering on histrionics. While one of my favorite mystery writers, Karin Fossum, beautifully whispers about Big Things, Ms. Millar screams about them in a loud, theatrical voice. Another favorite writer of mine, Denise Mina, gives nuanced, subtle, utterly realistic treatment of ill-adjusted people's motives and behavior, while the conflicts of Ms. Millar's characters seem made-up and fake. It cannot be the age of the novel. Ms. Millar's husband, Ross Macdonald wrote deeply realistic novels about human condition at about the same time.
Finally, the denouement. I guessed what the resolution will be about mid-novel, which is not a complaint as I never care whether the ending is a surprise or not. Yet, to me the ending cheapens the novel, sort of like a magician explaining a simple trick after an enthralling performance. Well, let's just say I am too dense to appreciate the greatness of this novel.
One and a half stars.
Helen Clarvoe, a well-off, young, but lonely woman receives a nasty phone call from one Evelyn Merrick, who predicts that bad things will happen to Helen. Helen calls Mr. Blackshear, the family lawyer who manages her money, and asks him to find Ms. Merrick and make sure that she stops harassing her. Obviously, things do not go as planned; Ms. Merrick continues to call various people and tell dreadful things about people close to them. There is a murder and another death, and the reader gradually learns about events from the past.
My first gripe is minor and pertains to basic plausibility. Why would anyone believe words of a relative stranger? Suppose someone calls my wife and tells her that I committed some vile acts. My wife would laugh it off. While she knows that I am foolish, clumsy, lazy, conceited, and ... (well, let's talk about it some other time), she knows that I am not vile. Words are just words, most everybody lies every day, why then confuse something that someone says with reality? Sure, words can hurt, but not in that simple way.
Further, I am unable to relate to people who are so self-centered that their inability to align their real persona with their self-image, the fact that they are not someone who they would like to be, is the greatest tragedy of their life. Yes, it is a somewhat common human trait, but to me utterly uninteresting. I would rather read about why life is often hell for well-adjusted and well-meaning people, forced to be around each other. True, Ms. Millar introduces a thread where someone suffers because of societal norms and forces (by the way, that thread shows how dated the novel is, how much these norms have changed in the 60 years since the novel was published), yet there is too precious little of it, and we have to read instead about people's struggles with their self-perceived inadequacies.
What I can stand the least is the over-expressive style, bordering on histrionics. While one of my favorite mystery writers, Karin Fossum, beautifully whispers about Big Things, Ms. Millar screams about them in a loud, theatrical voice. Another favorite writer of mine, Denise Mina, gives nuanced, subtle, utterly realistic treatment of ill-adjusted people's motives and behavior, while the conflicts of Ms. Millar's characters seem made-up and fake. It cannot be the age of the novel. Ms. Millar's husband, Ross Macdonald wrote deeply realistic novels about human condition at about the same time.
Finally, the denouement. I guessed what the resolution will be about mid-novel, which is not a complaint as I never care whether the ending is a surprise or not. Yet, to me the ending cheapens the novel, sort of like a magician explaining a simple trick after an enthralling performance. Well, let's just say I am too dense to appreciate the greatness of this novel.
One and a half stars.
March 7, 2019
That was a lot of fun! I would suggest reading this one straight through in one sitting.
December 10, 2021
Let's call this one "evolution of a reader."
Nancy Drew was my girl back in the 80s. My maternal grandmother would send me the reprinted earlier titles for my birthdays, and I checked the rest out from the library. Then in middle school, I discovered Christopher Pike, V.C. Andrews, and, eventually, Stephen King, all of whom made those vanilla ghostwritten mysteries seem boring in comparison. In my 30s, Tana French and other modern writers rekindled my love of the mystery genre, and in my 40s, I've discovered the world of classic noir through James M. Cain and Patricia Highsmith. Little did I know that while Nancy was getting a makeover to be less tomboyish (leave that to George) and more respectful of authority, Margaret Millar was creating "a blood-curdling novel of horror and suspense" that tied in mental illness, homosexuality, pornography, and a whole lot of Hollywood debauchery that would never take place in River Heights.
Like Nancy, Helen Clarvoe grew up affluent, but without any of the grace or self-confidence that made Nancy so beloved. Helen has never fit in with the crowd and felt what a disappointment she was to her pretty, vacuous mother (who prefers Helen's delicate younger brother, Douglas) and her stern father. When her father dies, apparently leaving most of his investments to Helen, she moves from her childhood home to a rather shady hotel, where she lives alone and seldom goes out, hoarding her ever-increasing financial treasure like a dragon. Then a nasty phone call, from a woman who claims to be an old friend, shakes up her world and she enlists her family's semi-retired financial advisor to help her find this mysterious woman.
Miss Clarvoe sat, stiff with terror. In the crystal ball of the mirror her face was unchanged, unmutilated. The forehead was smooth, the mouth prim and self-contained, the skin paper-white, as if there was no blood left to bleed. Miss Clarvoe's bleeding had been done, over the years, in silence, internally.
Overall, Ms. Millar's characters are a shady lot, flawed and full of secrets (with the exception of Mr. Blackshear, the investor turned detective, who seems to be a pretty decent man looking to cure his boredom). And as Evelyn Merrick, Helen's tormentor, works her way through the phone book, she seems to find everyone's secrets and weak spots, using their pain for her own pleasure.
At a quarter to ten Evelyn Merrick stepped out of a telephone booth, stretched her left arm to relieve the cramp and smoothed her skirt down over her hips. Usually, after making a series of telephone calls, she felt a certain relief and relaxation, but tonight she was still excited. The blood drummed double-time in her ears and behind her eyes, and she lurched a little as she made her way back to the bar.
I've read enough (probably by authors influenced by Millar) to see the plot twist coming early in the novel, but that didn't stop me from thoroughly enjoying the ride. Ms. Millar gets inside her characters' heads brilliantly and never wastes a sentence. I sped through in two sittings, enjoying the melodramatic ending that was more appropriate when it was written.
Nancy Drew was my girl back in the 80s. My maternal grandmother would send me the reprinted earlier titles for my birthdays, and I checked the rest out from the library. Then in middle school, I discovered Christopher Pike, V.C. Andrews, and, eventually, Stephen King, all of whom made those vanilla ghostwritten mysteries seem boring in comparison. In my 30s, Tana French and other modern writers rekindled my love of the mystery genre, and in my 40s, I've discovered the world of classic noir through James M. Cain and Patricia Highsmith. Little did I know that while Nancy was getting a makeover to be less tomboyish (leave that to George) and more respectful of authority, Margaret Millar was creating "a blood-curdling novel of horror and suspense" that tied in mental illness, homosexuality, pornography, and a whole lot of Hollywood debauchery that would never take place in River Heights.
Like Nancy, Helen Clarvoe grew up affluent, but without any of the grace or self-confidence that made Nancy so beloved. Helen has never fit in with the crowd and felt what a disappointment she was to her pretty, vacuous mother (who prefers Helen's delicate younger brother, Douglas) and her stern father. When her father dies, apparently leaving most of his investments to Helen, she moves from her childhood home to a rather shady hotel, where she lives alone and seldom goes out, hoarding her ever-increasing financial treasure like a dragon. Then a nasty phone call, from a woman who claims to be an old friend, shakes up her world and she enlists her family's semi-retired financial advisor to help her find this mysterious woman.
Miss Clarvoe sat, stiff with terror. In the crystal ball of the mirror her face was unchanged, unmutilated. The forehead was smooth, the mouth prim and self-contained, the skin paper-white, as if there was no blood left to bleed. Miss Clarvoe's bleeding had been done, over the years, in silence, internally.
Overall, Ms. Millar's characters are a shady lot, flawed and full of secrets (with the exception of Mr. Blackshear, the investor turned detective, who seems to be a pretty decent man looking to cure his boredom). And as Evelyn Merrick, Helen's tormentor, works her way through the phone book, she seems to find everyone's secrets and weak spots, using their pain for her own pleasure.
At a quarter to ten Evelyn Merrick stepped out of a telephone booth, stretched her left arm to relieve the cramp and smoothed her skirt down over her hips. Usually, after making a series of telephone calls, she felt a certain relief and relaxation, but tonight she was still excited. The blood drummed double-time in her ears and behind her eyes, and she lurched a little as she made her way back to the bar.
I've read enough (probably by authors influenced by Millar) to see the plot twist coming early in the novel, but that didn't stop me from thoroughly enjoying the ride. Ms. Millar gets inside her characters' heads brilliantly and never wastes a sentence. I sped through in two sittings, enjoying the melodramatic ending that was more appropriate when it was written.
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