Margaret Millar Saturday Matinée Spoilers

Having complained about spoilers dropped by a forgotten reviewer, I'll warn that I'm about to commit the same crime. Anyone who has not read Margaret Millar's Beast in View might want to stop at this point.

This is not about the novel, but the two television adaptations: 1964 and 1986 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The first is worth watching, if only for Joan Hackett's portrayal of Helen Clarvoe.

On the surface, Hackett's casting is curious. She's meant to portray a Plain Jane, but little attempt is made to hide her good looks. Let's remember that this accomplished actress first garnered public attention as teenage model. Like her paper counterpart, television Helen lives in a hotel suite. While there's a slightly glamourous air about her – in the first scene, she looking over fashion drawings – she's otherwise very true to the character Millar created. Knowing what little I do about Ms Hackett, I'm not surprised. Supremely talented, but difficult to work with, she had a reputation as a perfectionist. I'm betting she read Millar's novel – and more than once.

James Bridges, who went on to write and direct The Paper Chase and The China Syndrome, had the task of adapting the novel for cathode ray tubes. The fifty minutes he was allotted cuts most characters, the foremost being Douglas, Evelyn's homosexual ex-husband. No real surprise there. Bridges adds motion in having Helen sabotage the wedding before it ever takes place, thus giving Evelyn – here named Dorothy – motivation for revenge. Clever. 

While it claims to be based upon the novel, the 1986 adaptation isn't an adaptation at all. Clocking in at a mere 23 minutes, credits and posthumous Hitchcock intro included, it's mercifully short and can be quickly described:

Privileged pop psychologist Marion McGregor, author of the bestseller Masculine Wants, Male Needs, marries former patient Cliff Potts. Her paradise is rocked by threatening messages left on her answering machine by first husband Gordon. But it can't be! Gordon died four years ago! The next thing you know Marion's dog is killed. We, but not she, see that a Peeping Tom is watching through the leaded glass windows of her luxurious home. The same man shows up at one of Marion's book signings and she flees for home

Cliff arrives to hear his wife struggling with Gordon. Cliff descends the cellar stairs, stumbles around a bit, and discovers Marion with the mummified corpse of her first husband. But is it really his wife? In her own twisted mind, she's become Gordon. As Marion chases Cliff, trying to kill him with a shovel, it becomes clear that she left those answering machine messages. The police arrive in the nick of time. The Peeping Tom turns out to be psychiatrist Dr Kaufman, who we learn has been treating Marion. Phew.

The climax of this Beast in View owes much to Psycho, and as with Psycho, everything is explained in the denouement:

Dr Kaufman: I should have institutionalized her four years ago when she first told me.
Cliff: Why didn't you?
Dr Kaufman: Why? Oh, professional ethics [emphasis mine], one shrink to another. I thought I could help her. She was making such great progress. Then when I found out she was marrying you, I knew it was happening all over again.
Cliff: What was happening?
Dr Kaufman: Marion was losing control.
Cliff: What about Gordon's body? I mean, why would she...
Dr Kaufman: Keep it? Because she loved him. And that's what you do when you love somebody, and he's a beast. The cellar is the only place to hide.

So, you see, a beast in view... or out of view. He's hidden because, um...

Oh, forget it.

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The Telephone Always Rings

The Telephone Always Rings

Beast in View
Margaret Millar
New York: Bantam, 1956

Margaret Millar's big book, this was put aside for years after I read a review that gave away far too much of the plot. The same mistake will not be made here.

As with most Millars, things begin quietly. The protagonist, Helen Clarvoe, is not at all foreign to her fiction. Lonely and insecure she resides – but does not truly live – in a downtown hotel suite. Though just thirty, Helen meets the very definition of spinster. She has no friends or interests, dresses dowdy and is a bit of a prude. The suite might seem like an extravagance, but it only enables her to live as a shut-in; Helen is otherwise remarkably frugal.

Still, hotel suites don't come cheap. Miss Clarvoe is able to afford hers through an inheritance she's received from her late father. Estranged from her mother and sole sibling Douglas, Helen's only steady contact with the outside world comes in the form of Paul Blackshear, who handles her investments. It's to this man that Helen turns when things begin to go awry.

Much is made of Millar as someone who could pen psychological mysteries with a good twist, but I admire more her abilities to draw characters. In Beast in View the reader meets a good number of fascinating figures: Helen, her mother, Douglas, Blackshear, Jane the switchboard operator, school chum Eveleyn, charm school headmistress Lydia Hudson, photographer Jack Terola and painter Harley Moore, are just half of the cast. It says much that all are real, so fully fleshed, living in a novel that ends before hitting the bottom of page 120.

True, the type in this Bantam edition is small, but it's not at all dense. I've written before of my admiration for Millar's dialogue; here it is real and revealing to the point in which one feels that it would only be polite to close the book and leave the room. I can think of no better example than the six pages of dialogue in which Douglas reveals to his mother that he is gay.

This is the closest I'm going to come in spoiling the book.

It's tempting to slam Bantam for its author bio, which gives equal space to husband Ross Macdonald. However, after reading Millar on Beast in View, I'm willing to cut the publisher some slack.

In the Afterword to the 1993 International Polygionics edition, she writes that she abandoned the novel – "half-written" –  after happening upon a 1954 "television play" with a plot that was, in her words, "the same as the one I was writing."

The television play in question, Gore Vidal's Dark Possession, starring Geraldine Fitzgerald, is about... ah, but that would be spoiling things.

Millar tells us that her husband "stepped in as he often had in the past", presenting an idea that "altered the whole book". She reveals the idea, but I won't repeat it – again, that would be spoiling things.

Object: My copy, the first paperback edition, is as common as the first edition is scarce. What it has going for it is that cover. Equal parts sexy and scary, it beats all others. Anyone considering this edition would be wise to ignore the publisher's pitch page, which not only misleads, but tells far too much of what is to come. I present it here with spoilers blacked out:

Access: Reissued last autumn under the Orion imprint, British readers should have little trouble tracking down a copy. Canadians, meanwhile, are forced to look to used bookstores.

I've never encountered the 1955 Random House first edition, nor could I find an image. It's interesting to note that right now one – just one – copy is listed for sale online. It is signed not by Mrs Millar, but by Dorothy B. Hughes. The first British edition, published by Gollancz in 1955, seems to be just about as uncommon; two jacketless ex-library copies are listed, but nothing else. Those who don't care about such things will be pleased to learn that dozens of decent copies published by Bantam, Penguin, Avon, Orion, Corgi, Mystery Guild, International Polygonics, John Curley, Carroll & Graf and Hodder & Stoughton going for under five dollars.

Like most Margaret Millar novels, Beast in View has been translated numerous times. The first French edition, Mortellement vôtre (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1957), is the most attractive, even if the cover was recycled from Jay Barbette's Death's Long Shadow. German, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Japanese and Chinese also figure in the mix.

Most foreign-language titles have something to do with the idea of a beast –  狙った獣 (Aimed at the Beast), La bestia se acerca (The Beast is Coming). The best, 眼中的獵物 (The Eyes of the Prey), turns everything on its head. The worst, but most successful in terms of sales, is the German: Liebe Mutter, es geht mir gut... (Dear Mother, I Am Fine…).

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Margaret Millar Saturday Mantinée Spoilers

POD Cover of the Month: The Sky Pilot

Tutis Classics' edition of Ralph Connor's nineteenth-century novel about nineteenth-century settlers and ranchers in the foothills of nineteenth-century Alberta. At the centre of it all is Arthur Wellington Moore, a modest missionary come to convert cowboys. In the 1921 film adaptation he was played by tragic Hollywood figure John Bowers.

Some good soul has uploaded the entire thing to YouTube:

First edition:

The Sky Pilot: A Tale of the Foothills

Chicago: Revell, 1899

Runner up:

Tutis' take on The Man from Glengarry, the story of Ranald Macdonald, a nineteenth-century logger  who grows into manhood with the aid of a pious woman and the mighty Ottawa River.

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Freedom to Read Week: Forbidden Fruit

Forbidden Fruit

George Reid

1889

Freedom to Read Week: Nastiness is Found

The Windsor Daily Star, 16 November 1940

Freedom to Read Week: Under the Hill

Under the Hill

Aubrey Beardsley, completed by John Glassco

Paris: Olympia Press, 1959

An elegant favourite, in both appearance and content, I've written about Under the Hill here and in my biography of John Glassco. There will be few words today... just some images of a work that was seized and destroyed by French authorities. This is one of roughly 1500 copies that escaped the flames.

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Freedom to Read Week: Generals Die in Bed (II)

The Ottawa Citizen, 2 June 1930

LONDON, June 2 – Slurs on British generals and attacks on the behavior of Canadian troops as set forth in the book by Charles Yale Harrison, "General's Die in Bed," are repudiated in the press today by Lieut.-Colonel Colin Harding of the Fifteenth Royal Warwickshire Regiment, who served in the First Canadian Division in France and was closely allied with the Canadians throughout the war.

He wants to know why the author should wait twelve years to smudge the memory of fifty-six thousand Canadians who lost their lives fighting for the British Empire and discredit the services of those who survived. As for the alleged looting of Arras, Col. Harding demands the author's authority for the incident, and also for the alleged shooting down of defenceless German prisoners in revenge for torpedoing of the hospital ship Llandovery Castle. The colonel thinks that such books show the necessity for censorship before they are offered to the public as they are calculated to provoke ill-feeling between nations and act as a deterrent to peace.

Freedom to Read Week: Generals Die in Bed (I)

The Ottawa Citizen, 30 May 1930

NEW YORK. May 30. – Charles Yale Harrison, youthful author of the book "Generals Die in Bed," is surprised at the storm which followed publication of the book in London. Mr. Harrison, who served with the 14th Battalion Royal Montreal regiment in France and Belgium in 1917 and 1917 [sic], thinks the critics who have held his book slandered Canadian troops are unjustified. The author is on the staff of the New York newspaper, Bronx Home News, in the capacity as he himself puts it of a "newspaperman, not a journalist."

He told the Canadian Press today he was surprised at reports that his book might be banned in Canada. It will be published here in June and arrangements had been made for publication in the Dominion.

"For me to sneer at the fighting qualities of the Canadian soldier would be to sneer at myself," he said. "I want it distinctly understood that the Canadian Expeditionary Force was the best fighting unit in the field. Vimy Ridge, Ypres, the Somme, Cambrai and Mons speak for themselves."

War in Real Light.

Referring to criticism that the book showed Canadian soldiers in an untrue light morally. Harrison held he tried to picture war "as it really happened – not as some spinster ladies thought it should happen. War is dirty, disgusting and the sooner the world realizes that modern warfare is a demoralizing business the better it will be for the world."

Harrison has been criticized for stating Canadian troops looted Arras. He maintained he is correct in this but stated that "realizing the circumstances under which the town was looted. I did not consider that this in any way reflected upon the heroism and courage of the Canadian troops."

His attention was called to an editorial in which the London Daily Mail terms the book "slanderous."

"It is," Harrison said, "but it does not slander the troops of the C.E.F. It slanders war – and it is about time that a little of false glory with which war is enmeshed is torn away."

Harrison, who managed a Montreal motion picture theater following his return from France, says he works on a small paper because he finds it gives him leisure for writing.

Freedom to Read Week: Episode

"A remarkable first novel about madness – its feelings, treatment and powers."

— Books of the Month 

"Filth and muck."

— Raoul Mercier, K.C.

On 17 February 1956, a bitterly cold day in Ottawa, the American News Company was found guilty of having in its possession for the purpose of distribution "obscene written matter, to wit: 117 copies of a book entitled 'Episode', written by Peter W. Denzer."

The distributor was fined $5000 ($42,500 today), roughly $43 ($356) for each and every copy of the 25¢ paperback. This absurd amount would be described in The Canadian Bar Review as "by far and away the heaviest penalty imposed for an offence of this nature in Ontario, and probably Canada." Meanwhile, Crown prosecutor Raoul Mercier, the future Attorney General of Ontario, was clicking his heels.

The Vancouver Sun, 18 February 1956 

Peter Denzer died earlier the month at the age of ninety; his friend Peter Anastas paid tribute with a very fine obituary. It's important to note, I think, that the author of Episode, a novel about a man's struggle with mental illness, had himself suffered. What's more, Peter Denzer had been an early defender and sympathetic champion of those struggling with mental health disorders.

Episode is, I suppose, somewhat autobiographical. Hugh MacLennan was an admirer of the novel. His biographer, Elspeth Cameron, describes it as a precursor to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I've yet to come across a negative review. Everything I've read about Episode indicates that it is both fascinating and important. And yet, Canadians who want to read Episode are out of luck. You see, while Episode, can be found in libraries throughout the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, not a single Canadian library – public or academic – has a copy.

Those looking to place blame need only look to this little, little man:

 Raoul Mercier

1897-1967

Freedom to Read Week: Noir Canada

Noir Canada : Pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique

Alain Deneault, Delphine Abade and William Sacher

Montreal: Éditions Écosociété, 2008

Freedom to Read Week begins and the Lord's Day is darkening. We live now in a Canada governed by a party that equates 'opposition' with 'enemy'. When presenting legislation, our Minister of Public Safety accuses those who find fault of being in league with child pornographers.

A few days pass and the minister trips up, revealing that he has not read the bill. He is surprised by its contents.

A few more days pass and we learn that the government called upon the Department of National Defence to help wage war on those who sit across the aisle in the House of Commons. An hour passes and an even bigger scandal breaks.

The message is clear: Do not question the government.

While scientists are muzzled, for the most part we writers have had it pretty easy. True, the theatre critics in the Prime Minister's Office described an unread yet to be performed play as "glorifying terrorism", but that's as bad as it's got... so far. As Michael Healey might tell you, the chill is in.

Noir Canada is not our prime minister's hockey book, but it's entirely appropriate that he struts his stuff on the cover. For nearly four years, Barrick Gold pursued publisher les Éditions Écosociété, Alain Deneault, Delphine Abadie, and William Sacher, seeking to add six million Canadian dollars to its US$10.9 billion (2010) in annual revenues.

Here, I'll mention – and just mention – something known as a SLAPP, a strategic lawsuit against public participation. The reason I'm saying no more on the subject will become clear through reading Candice Valentine's 'Code of Silence', published in the November 2011 edition of The Walrus.

Late last year, Noir Canada was withdrawn from sale. The small Montreal press paid an undisclosed sum to the world's largest gold mining producer and the media looked the other way; Justin Bieber had signed a Hyundai for charity.

I imagine Barrick Gold's Board of Directors were satisfied.

Better to bury a book than to burn it. Flames attract attention.