A Kiss Before Dying, Ira Levin, Franklin Library, 1989

Description: From an interview with mystery writer Simon Brett in which he identifies A Kiss before Dying as one of the best whodunnits (https://fivebooks.com/best-books/whodunnits-simon-brett/#book-3333): Let’s go on to A Kiss Before Dying, published in 1953, which a lot of people say is Ira Levin’s best book. Stephen King is hugely complimentary about Levin: ‘Every novel he has ever written has been a marvel of plotting. He is the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel; he makes what the rest of us do look like those five-dollar watches you can buy in the discount drug stores.’ He wrote A Kiss Before Dying very young: I think it was his first book. If you look at the history of the crime novel, the whodunits, where there was a puzzle and a device, were very popular in the 1920s and 1930s. But since World War II there have been very few books which rely on a trick – like, famously, the Agatha Christie where the narrator turns out to be the murderer. One would have thought that at the end of the so-called golden age, at the end of the 1930s, that all those tricks had been done. But in A Kiss Before Dying, there is such a device. I won’t describe it, because I don’t want to give it away, but it is a kind of verbal trick. And it’s one of those books where you get halfway through and you actually go back through the book and think, I know this, there’s a piece of information that has been kept from me… It’s also a very tense novel, again, about a murderer. But there is this central device that is so clever, that at the end you both hug yourself with glee at how good it is and kick yourself because you didn’t get it. What do you think it is that makes a really great whodunnit? Like any good novel it creates a world of its own, and at the end of the book you know more about that world. In a crime novel it’s done through an investigation, normally a murder, but at the end you know not only who committed the crime, but you also know a lot about the environment that gave rise to this kind of pressure, the boil that was lanced by the murder. You’ve gotten to know the characters a lot better, and you know what pressures they were under. Also, I think increasingly in crime novels, you know that crime is not without consequence. Because I think there was a danger with the golden age ones that they were nice little puzzles really. Murder was just a device to turn a key in an investigation, whereas now, in contemporary crime fiction, you’re much more aware of the consequences. I think it’s partly because we’ve lost the death penalty in England. In the golden age, it was wonderful: Hercule Poirot would get them all in the library and point at one person and say, ‘For zees reazons you deed it…’ and they’d go off and be hanged, end of story. But now, of course, the ramifications of crime and punishment are gone into more and there’s much more questioning of how close the criminal is to the investigation. Which was there from the start – look at Sherlock Holmes with Moriarty. It’s a very broad church now, crime fiction, and all kinds of things can fit into it. BCFL1/0gj

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