Margaret Millar
1955
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
This
murder mystery takes place in Los Angeles in the 1950s. A wealthy,
antisocial woman, Helen Clarvoe, starts getting weird, threatening phone
calls from an old acquaintance. The calls scare her, so she hires her
family’s financial advisor, Mr. Blackshear, to try to find out who is
calling her and why. This leads Mr. Blackshear on a nice investigation
in which he uncovers all sorts of interesting secrets about Helen’s past
and the other members of her family, and during which one of the people
he is investigating commits suicide and another is murdered.
What
I liked about this book most of all was the author’s clear,
straightforward style. It was a pretty complicated story, and Millar
certainly doesn’t use a simple vocabulary, but her writing is nevertheless easy to
read. She is not deliberately obscure or pretentious or too obvious
about trying to create suspense.
The book was also small, a tidy
156 pages. I think that Millar knew the story she wanted to tell and
didn't feel that she needed to add a lot of unnecessary fluff around it.
Which I appreciate.
I also enjoyed reading a mystery about
post-war non-Hollywood society in Los Angeles by somebody with a very
different take on it than Raymond Chandler.
One notable aspect of
this book is that one of the key characters, Helen’s brother Douglas,
is gay. I thought that his character was handled amazingly well,
considering that this book was written in 1955. Douglas is a full,
complex person, not a monster or a silly stereotype. And when his mother
finds out and wants to take him to a clinic to get “cured,” he explains
to her (and the reader) that this is a part of who he is and it isn’t
anything that he can be cured of.
The back cover of the 2000
edition of this book advertises that it pulls the main characters into a
world of “extortion, pornography, vengeance, and murder." I don't know
if it's really all that exciting, but it was a good read, with a clear
style and plot twists that kept me interested through to the end.
An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
Dear Cthulhu,
ReplyDeleteI trust you are riding out the coronavirus comfortably in your Antarctica lair!
I was just thinking of you, as I've been immersed in Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko mystery novels. I had read Gorky Park long ago (actually up at Knollwood, I think) but had no idea he had followed it up with a string of sequels. I highly recommend them on the off chance you haven't already read them!