BEAST IN VIEW by Margaret Millar

Wealthy, neurotic spinster Helen Clarvoe lives alone in a hotel suite in Los Angeles. She's begun to receive harassing phone calls from an Evelyn Merrick, phone calls that frighten her. She's estranged from her family since her father died, so she calls up Paul Blackshear, an investment banker who had dealings with her father, to find out what's going on.

Beast in View was first published in 1955 and won the Edgar award for Best Novel. It's easy to see why; this isn't a traditional mystery novel but a great, trendsetting  psychological suspense work. It takes us from the swank home of the Clarvoes to a pornographer's studio, a massage parlor, and elsewhere. Blackshear starts to fall for Helen, seeing her as someone who needs protection. Evelyn Merrick goes around, harassing people by telling the dirtiest secrets of those close to them, and two deaths occur before Blackshear finally tracks her down and discovers her devastating secret.

As fun reading as this is, there are some drawbacks. One is that the central concept is a bit hackneyed now and experienced readers will catch on quickly. Some of the psychology is a bit outdated; a gay character is handled in a rather odd manner, both cliched and somewhat sympathetic when you realize he's a seriously screwed-up person overall. But we're given looks into the heads of various characters, which makes for good reading. Millar knew human nature, that's for sure.

Millar (1915-1994) was a Canadian-born suspense writer who is criminally overlooked today. (Her husband, Kenneth Millar, wrote highly-regarded hard-boiled novels as Ross McDonald and is still in print. Shameful sexism, I say.) But her books are being rereleased in ebook formats and you can occasionally come across them in libraries and used book stores. BIV was filmed as an episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" but little else of her work was filmed; a movie of another novel, The Iron Gates, was planned with Bette Davis in the lead, but Davis rejected the role as her character would be gone for the last third of the film, and the project died.

Beast in View is out there as an ebook and in used copies. Go find it, folks. This is cracking good reading.

A (late) February Night at the Cinema

We eschewed our normal mid-month movie date as it was Valentine's Day, and are meeting instead tonight. V-Day is such a terrible night for a friendly get-together; restaurants all have couples' specials, movie theaters are full of cooing couples, and sometimes you can't stand the bars and cafes.

Tonight is pleasant; rain is melting the snow, the air is warm with the promise of spring, and we're enjoying a good meal at our favorite place, where they're happy to see us, couples be damned.

After dinner, we wander up the street to that slightly shabby old movie house for the latest old chiller...1935's A SHOT IN THE DARK!



After the show, it's off to our favorite cafe, thankfully now devoid of cardboard hearts...

THE CRAZY CORNER by Jean Richepin

Here's a real treasure house!

Jean Richepin (1849-1926) was a contributor to the legendary Grand Guignol and to the conte cruel literature of fin-de-siecle France, but his relentless ghoulishness set him apart from the rest, who normally wallowed in mere irony. This collection, translated by Brian Stableford, brings together two of Richepin's short-story collections, with a sprinkling of his other works.

It starts off subtly, with the story "Lilith," in which two students observe a neighbor's strange ritual and slowly piece together a vague idea of a terrible tragedy that might be behind it. It becomes more and more gruesome...in "The Clock" an old man attempts to repair a town's tower clock, but only can do so at a terrible price. Some, like "The Enemy" and "A Duel of Souls," deal with madness and obsession. "The City of Gems" look at the line between madness and sanity, and how seemingly sane people can be coaxed into mad beliefs. Some deal with sexuality, like "Booglottism," in which a man is coaxed into a sexual encounter with a woman who keeps her face hidden....and later find a secret, not quite horrible, but chilling and a bit disgusting. Or "The Ugly Sisters," of two old women who live in a small town....who have a somewhat surprising secret. There's femmes fatale, feckless men, criminals, and sex at its most destructive. One faintly appalling story, "La Morillonne," deals with a beautiful woman who consistently gives birth to monstrously deformed children....and it's her livelihood. And the nasty "Jeroboam," a tale of human deception and manipulation that reads like something from a Jim Thompson tale. There's even a novella, "In Less Time Than It Takes to Write," about a callow youth's adventures in the Paris underworld.

Perhaps the most harrowing tale is "Mademoiselle," a tale of a somewhat not-all-there boy in a small town who dresses as a girl and is accepted as "mademoiselle" by the townsfolk until he tries to dress in male clothes...and disaster results. Cross-dressing was nothing new...but this could be an early example of gender confusion or even transsexualism.

The stories are relatively short, and often lack traditional denouements, so sometimes you'll be left feeling like they cut off too soon sometimes...but then you stop and think and piece them together and then...yikes! That was the art of the conte cruel; it was often short and nasty.

This is a superior collection that is available both in print and as an ebook from the good people at Black Coat Press. Look into it...

A February Night at the Concert Hall

So we're off again to our favorite concert venue, for an evening of music and fun. And tonight, as a change from the usual seriousness, they include some light works from various composers, including this delightful piece of devilishness...



A good bit of fun, eh? This piece was used as theme music for the BBC radio show "Dick Barton, Special Agent." It's a good piece with undertones of excitement and adventure in store.

So we're on to February, folks! Let's hope the usual February blahs don't get us down...

Required Reading: THE POISONED CHOCOLATES CASE by Anthony Berkeley

So, not long ago I sang the praises of Berkeley's story "The Avenging Chance." Berkeley later expanded it into a full-length novel...and it's even better. The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) is an acknowledged classic of the Golden Age of Detection, and you have to read it.

The setup is the same. A box of chocolates is sent to a raffish nobleman at his club. Revolted at the gesture, he gives the box to a fellow member who just happens to be nearby. Fellow member takes it home to his wife, in payment for a bet. He eats one, she eats several. He gets sick, and she dies. Who sent the box? Who was the intended victim?

This time around, Berkeley has his detective, Roger Sheringham, part of a group of armchair detectives, the Crime Circle, who are contacted by the police after they hit a brick wall in their investigation. There are six people in the Crime Circle, and each person takes their turn presenting their notions of how it was committed, who the intended victim was, and the identity of the perpetrator...and their own ideas of the motive and parallels to real-life crimes. There's no violence or visits to the crime scene here...each person does some of their own digging and investigating, and each hypothesis has its own merits.

And don't think that it ends the same way as the story....it doesn't. The solution from the story is presented as a possibility....and then shot down by further evidence. The various ideas presented get more and more intense...and even include suspicions cast on other members of the Crime Circle, leading to interpersonal tensions. And when the final solution is presented...and everyone knows it's the right one...it's devastating, and we're left hanging as to whether they'll be able to prosecute.

This is a hell of a read, and worth your time. It's been reprinted in paper format; so far unavailable as an ebook yet.

Anthony Berkeley Cox was one of the classic authors of the Golden Age; he wrote under a number of pseudonyms, and Francis Iles he wrote Before the Fact, which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Suspicion. I hope to review more of his works.

Snowbound Satuday at the Cinema!

OK, so we can't get together for our monthly night at the movies because there's been a historic blizzard, with at least a couple of feet of snow covering the streets. We're all hunkered at home, in singles or in groups, but at least we all have power. Coordinating by phone and social media, we decide to all watch the same movie on cable. It's one of those old b/w mystery movies we love so much, and this time it's extra-special because it's "The Mysterious Mr. Wong" with Bela Lugosi!



Our interactions online are uproarious, as we each sample drinks and food in our own homes. Although it's not our monthly evening out, it's a pretty good replacement, and we plan to repeat this whenever we're all housebound...because they're saying these storms may come more frequently...

Tales of Hoffmann: A Twofer

I'm overdue, I know. I've had a few crazy weeks and haven't been able to concentrate. But now I'm housebound by the expected blizzard, so I'm sitting down to get updated and all...

For this episode of "Tales of Hoffmann," I read two stories....

First, "Tobias Martin, Master Cooper" is entertaining enough, but also kind of annoying. It's a story of a cooper (barrel-maker) who has a gorgeous daughter whom he refuses to marry off until she finds a cooper of sufficient skill to impress him. Several young men apprentice themselves to Dad, work hard, and eventually one of them is chosen by the daughter and they marry.

That's it.

Seriously, that's it. No magic, no mystery, nothing macabre or outre at all. Hoffmann may have been a Romantic writer, and there is something here about how great and clean it is to work with one's hands, and a bit of German nationalism, but that's it. This is the most mundane Hoffmann story I've read so far. It was part of his 1818 collection "The Serapion Brethren" and one almost suspects it is filler.

The other story...

In "The Mines of Falun," we have young sailor, Elis, who is depressed as he went to sea to support his family, but returned home to find them all dead. He meets an old miner who talks of the glories of the underground world, and even talks of a Queen of the underground, whom he has sworn devotion to. Elis, enchanted, follows a miner to the mines of Falun (a real-life copper mining district of Sweden, and the photo above is from the mines). He is initially horrified by the reality of the mines, but is convinced by the miners' good spirits and sense of community to start working. He meets the head honcho Pehrson and his lovely daughter Ulla, and soon falls for the latter.

But one day Elis is in the mine and meets the old miner again, who mocks him for his love for Ulla and tells him he must give his devotion to the Queen of the Underworld. He finds out later that this old miner is a ghost, Torbern, who was devoted to the mines and the underground world, and who vanished in a cave-in a century before.

Elis is tormented by his love both for Ulla and for the underground world. He is ready to marry Ulla but on an impulse, just before his wedding, he goes down into the mines to fetch a rare mineral for her wedding present...and he vanishes in a cave-in.

Fifty years later, Elis' body is found in the mines, in a perfect state of preservation. He is brought to the surface, where an old lady approaches. It is Ulla, who has lived alone and is now half-mad. She embraces the preserved body as it crumbles to dust, and then she collapses, dead.

Now THIS is macabre!

It's got some themes you'll start to recognize in Hoffmann, of being torn between the mundane everyday world and a world of dreams and magic. (We saw this in "The Golden Flower Pot.") There's dark, morbid stuff, and not just with the ghost....we're left to wonder if Elis wasn't some sort of arranged sacrifice to the Queen of the Underworld? And there's a bit of Romanticism in its praise of being a regular working guy and thinking what you do is beautiful. It's hard to decide of Elis had stumbled into this or if he had been lead into a trap by Torbern's ghost. This isn't Hoffmann at his best, but he is close to the peak of his power, and this is from the same collection that the previous story was in.

Another macabre twist is that it's based (somewhat) on a real incident. In 1719, miners at the Falun mines came across a corpse in a disused passage, in perfect preservation. Brought to the surface, he was identified as Mats Israelsson (or Fet-Mats, as he was commonly known) by his former fiancee; he had vanished 42 years earlier, in 1677. When he was brought into the air, his body dried and became stonelike. Touted as a "petrified man," he was put on display, where the naturalist Linnaeus saw him and said he wasn't petrified, but covered in vitriol, and would decompose when it evaporated. That proved to be true, and he was buried under a church floor in 1749, then dug up during renovations in 1860 and put on display again, until finally reinterred in 1930. Fet-Mats' story was famous and he was written about by many of the Romantics, but Hoffmann's story is the one that has endured. There was almost an opera based on the story, to have been bombastically composed by Wagner, but it never came to be.

So. One story not all that great, but the other packs a real whallop, especially when you learn of the back story. "The Mines of Falun" is very much worth checking out, and feel free to skip "Tobias Martin, Master Cooper."