In Murder Mystery, a reader sits in bed with his head buried in a book, captivated by a presumably gruesome, suspenseful tale. The leisurely pursuit of reading, like the movies, was a popular form of release in the mid-20th century—one that activated the imagination through the vivid arrangement of words rather than images. Chicagoan Margo Hoff created a cocoon-like world—the reader’s domestic space rendered in allover decoration of finely lined patterns and blocks of color. Hoff’s interest in abstraction is visible in these compositional details and she would turn more fully to a nonobjective vocabulary later in her career.
