ŷ������

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