Each vintage book brings interesting discoveries. For instance, we recently learned that there was once a drink made with sherry and an egg yolk. Seriously. Reading Beast in View we learned that another name once used for scissors—at least by author Margaret Milar—was “paper knife.” Always have a really big paper knife around the house. Small ones are fine for cutting paper, but the huge ones are better for going through arteries. A terrible fate, surely, though no worse than drinking sherry with an egg yolk in it. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The villain in Beast in View begins as nothing more than a serial phone harasser who seems to know just enough about her victims to prey on their insecurities. The lies she tells her victims are terrible, and the language is ugly too. More direct forms of harassment soon commence, just about the time amateur sleuth Paul Blackshear steps in and is asked to find the caller. That seems easy enough at first, but he soon finds that identity is a more nebulous concept than he imagined.
Beast in View won the 1955 Edgar Award for best mystery of the year. Hmm… well we liked it. But is it really better than Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, which it beat? We don’t know about that. Later Beast in View was voted one of the best mysteries of all time by the Mystery Writers of America. That’s a broader accolade, in a way, and we can’t find any fault there. It’s a good book, written in classical mystery style, with a great ending, and this line:
[no spoiler] felt no pain, only a little surprise at how pretty the blood looked, like bright and endless ribbons that would never again be tied.
Well, that’s certainly a nice piece of writing. This was our second Millar, and we have another lined up for a bit later. But first we may re-read The Talented Mr. Ripley, just to see if our memories are betraying us and Highsmith really isn’t the better writer. But it isn’t a competition anyway, is it? That defeats the entire point of reading for pleasure. Copyright on Beast in View is originally 1955, and this Bantam paperback edition came in ’56 with Mitchell Hooks cover art of a woman holding Millar’s paper knife.
