Beast in View
by Margaret Millar
Summary
Helen Clarvoe is thirty years old, has a small fortune, and lives alone in a residential hotel because she prefers it to people. Her mother resents her and her brother keeps his distance. The one person who takes any interest is Paul Blackshear, the family's lawyer, and he does it reluctantly.
Then the telephone calls start. They are strange before they are threatening, and they know things about Helen that a stranger should not. She asks Blackshear to find out who is making them, and he agrees because it seems a small favour.
Saying more would be a disservice. Beast in View is one of the most famous twists in crime fiction and it is genuinely earned rather than sprung, which means the pleasure of a second reading is watching Millar put it in front of you the whole time. If anyone offers to tell you about this book, stop them.
It is short, barely two hundred pages, and Millar wastes nothing. The prose is cool and exact, the dialogue is very good, and the whole thing is built on an unsettling insight into how a person can be persuaded of something about themselves.
It is more psychological suspense than detection, closer to Patricia Highsmith than to Agatha Christie. Nobody assembles the suspects in a drawing room; the dread is domestic and it comes from inside the family. Millar is also very sharp on the particular loneliness of a woman with money and no life, and on a mother who has decided which of her children she prefers. It holds up remarkably well for a novel written in the middle 1950s.
Historical Context & Significance
Beast in View won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1956, and the prize record contains a detail that has aged into an argument. It beat Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley. Both novels are now considered classics of psychological crime writing, and the Mystery Writers of America chose Millar.
The choice has largely been vindicated. H.R.F. Keating placed Beast in View on his 1987 list of the crime genre's hundred best books, praising Millar's prose as superb on almost every page, and the book is routinely described as one of the finest psychological mysteries written.
Millar's own reputation has been less steady. She was for decades read chiefly as the wife of Kenneth Millar, who wrote as Ross Macdonald; critics such as H.R.F. Keating have since ranked her prose among the best the genre has produced. A run of reissues has brought most of her novels back into print.