Beast in View was published by Random House in 1955 and won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel from the Mystery Writers of America. It established Margaret Millar as one of the supreme practitioners of psychological suspense — a writer whose interests lay not in the mechanics of crime but in the architecture of disturbed minds.
Helen Clarvoe is thirty, wealthy, and entirely isolated: she lives in a residential hotel, sees no one, ventures nowhere. She begins receiving phone calls from a woman calling herself Evelyn Merrick — a name from Helen’s past, a girl she knew at school who has apparently returned to torment her. Helen hires a lawyer, Paul Blackshear, to find Evelyn and stop the harassment. What Blackshear discovers is far more disturbing than a simple stalker.
The novel’s famous twist ending (which should not be revealed to new readers) reframes everything that has preceded it, revealing that the “beast” of the title — the predatory, destructive force threatening Helen — is not external. Millar constructs her plot with surgical precision: every detail that seems to point in one direction is revealed, retrospectively, to point in another. The effect is not mere puzzle-solving but genuine psychological horror: the revelation illuminates something true about the human capacity for self-deception and the violence that repression breeds.
Collecting Beast in View
First edition (Random House, New York, 1955): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $200–$600
- Very good: $75–$200
- Edgar Award winner — highly collectible