Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

In the Mood for Some Cocktails and Banter? Plus a Spot of Murder? Here Ya Go!

Collected Millar: The First Detectives by Margaret Millar

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This is a collection of five novels, written by Canadian author Margaret Miller in the 1940s.  The last two were Inspector Sands novels, but I’m afraid he is rather bland, although the second one, The Iron Gates, was a nifty puzzle.  But the first three, the Paul Prye Mysteries, were some good stuff. Let’s let Prye explain his vocation.  “I’m a kind of cosmopolitan quack.  If a lady in San Francisco wants to know why her husband has taken to eating paper bags, she might […]

Books in Their Time

Beast in View by Margaret Millar

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Margaret Millar’s mystery, Beast in View, initially puzzled me. The language used and various formalities made the setting sound like the 19th century, only there were modern features like cars. It also reminded me of English mysteries set in small towns where everyone knows each other, but this was set in the sprawling LA area. The plot moved slow as the mystery unfolded, and seemed derivative of other more famous books and short stories. A woman in her 30s, Helen Clarvoe, is being stalked by […]

She wanted to say, Give me the police, the way people did in plays…

Beast in View by Margaret Millar

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So this is one of those kinds of novels from the 1950s that we kind of still get but don’t as much any more where the kinds of domestic utopian bliss that the lies of the 1950s post-war American society is built upon is disrupted in severe, violent, and drastic ways. This domesticity is disrupted and it’s very clear from now on that nothing will ever be the same.  So in this novel we meet Helen Clervoe who receives what is not clear may or […]

Agatha Christie, Eat Your Heart Out

Fire Will Freeze by Margaret Millar

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Agatha Christie is considered the godmother of the cozy mystery, even though her books are tonally different than the cozies of today. If you’re not familiar with the cozy mystery: quaint country side, quirky-but-endearing characters, random corpse, a place where murder rarely happens. Nowadays, people dress up cozies with animals and recipes but when Christie was writing them, they had a tinge of the hardboiled in them. Not much; Christie will never be confused for Raymond Chandler. But just enough. I don’t know if Margaret […]

Squicky

Beast In View by Margaret Millar

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Read as part of CBR11 Bingo: Award winner. This book won the 1957 Edgar Award for best Mystery work. This book edged out Patricia Highsmith’s legendary The Talented Mr. Ripley for the 1957 Edgar Award. Both of them are more psychological thrillers than mysteries. Both were written by world class female crime writers, maybe 1 and 1a of the genre. Yet while Patricia Highsmith’s work has endured (she’s the only woman whose works have been republished by the Everyman’s Library), Millar’s were largely forgotten for decades. This […]

Maybe in a different time and a different place…

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Although her books are beginning to come back into print at last, and most (if not all) of her oeuvre is available for digital download, Margaret Millar is a name sadly lost to the annals of history. She was actually a successful writer for a long time who won an Edgar Award in 1956 for Beast In View. Had she lived today, she’d be right up there with women such as Megan Abbott and Laura Lippman who dominate bestseller lists with their exciting blend of thriller and […]



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