Helen Clarvoe is 30 years old, an heiress, and a shut-in. She’s all alone, so when she starts getting unnerving phone calls from a stalker, she has no one to turn to—except her family’s attorney, Paul Blackshear. Helen’s relationship with her family itself is strained at best. She hasn’t seen her mother in ages, and her brother, who is gay, married and then left her former best friend.

Margaret Millar’s chilling story touches on themes of class, isolation, and sexual orientation while fleshing out each of its characters—and it ends with a bang. Set in 1950s Los Angeles and published in 1955, Beast in View blazed a trail, sagely predicting and masterfully deploying crime fiction tropes of the new millennium, from an unreliable narrator to its final plot twist. The novel won the 1956 Edgar Award for Best Novel and was adapted for the anthology TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. —Laura Zornosa for Time

Stop by the Reference Desk after the previous month’s meeting to pick up a copy of the title, or request it through the catalog HERE.  You are also welcome to acquire your own copy.

Supplemental Reading:

Wikipedia overview of the novel and background HERE.

Book Club Background:

Join us in person or online to look at the history of Mystery as a book genre.

It has been almost 200 years since the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and since then, mystery as a genre has exploded in form, length, language, and more. From The Lady in White, Wilkie Collins’ novel that is considered the first of the genre, through the serialized adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the Golden Age of Agatha Christie, the advent of noir, the rise of thrillers, romantic suspense, and an international cast of characters ranging from retired police officers to meddling sleuths, some famous twins, and armchair detectives.

TIME MAGAZINE PICKS THE 100 BEST MYSTERY NOVELS OF ALL TIME

Each month we might read an article, a short story, a book, or a selection from the same author or the same country. We’ll look at award winners and debut novelists, the standard bearers and the rule breakers. We may talk about movies and TV, too.  We’ll work our way through the decades, looking at similar themes, exotic settings, and recent innovations in a genre that is both familiar and new.

Some of the authors we’ll cover: Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Mary Higgins Clark, Alexander McCall Smith, Jo Nesbo, and more!

Check out the recent Edgar Award winners HERE.

We’ll run this group as hybrid, so anyone can join. Please click below to register for the program the first time you wish to attend. Contact the Library at HERE to request the Zoom link. Returning readers do not need to register unless they need the Zoom link. You can choose in-person or Zoom each month, as it fits your schedule!

At the end of the day, the butler may have done it, but we’ll decide if he was justified!