Ira Levin is the guy who wrote The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby. This is his 1953 debut novel.
He was 23, and his talent is incredible. A Kiss Before Dying is a thriller – a very good one that pulled me in immediately. It was wonderfully structured and executed.
I’ll spoil the main twists (I warn you that you will enjoy the novel much less if you read them):
The antagonist is a man who wants to marry into money. His college girlfriend gets pregnant too early and he knows a shotgun marriage would get her disowned by her harsh father, a wealthy industrialist. She won’t abort, so he kills her. Then he transfers to the school of one of her two sisters and successfully courts that sister – he’s heard a lot about her and how to appeal to her. When the sister starts playing detective and gets too close, he kills her as well. He moves back to his hometown for a bit, where he feels suffocated. And then… the mad lad… he decides to go after the third sister. I picked this novel up at a book swap in a park, and at this point I got out of my camp chair to walk around, cackling.
He makes a pros and cons list. The pros include “I already know a lot about her” and “it would perfectly wash away the sour taste of failing the first two times”. And he can’t think of a single con.
All three of the rich man’s daughters have damage from growing up in an unloving home, and are susceptible to affectionate men. All crave love, and are emotionally vulnerable. The third sister is the one the other two call “the intellectual”. The most remote one, the most anxious one. She lives alone and cares meticulously for her apartment, which is filled with the things she loves: her books, her favorite art, her music. Her secret heart. The killer finds it hard to get to her – normal charm doesn’t work. But after the first flirtation fails he arranges a chance meeting in the museum she’s touring alone, and gushes about the artists he’s researched – the ones he knows to be her favorite –
They get engaged. Her father, the industrialist, doesn’t necessarily like him, but he can see his daughter – whom he’s started caring for more after the deaths of the other two – blossoming in the relationship. He also sees that his prospective son in law is trying to reconcile her to him. When he’s contacted by man who was drawn into the second daughter’s investigation before her death, claiming that he’s found the killer, the father doesn’t like what he hears. But the evidence is increasingly hard to ignore.
The third daughter is looped in; she moves from disbelief to anguish when shown her fiancé’s research notebook on her, filled with details from her sisters. She has a bit of nervous breakdown about it and isn’t super involved in the resolution, where the killer is cornered and overcome.
There’s good character work here. The third daughter – her remoteness, her romantic anxiety – is set up beautifully. So is the father, repenting his coldness, trying to make amends, unwilling to believe it because he can’t bear to destroy her happiness.
There’s a striking scene where the father is incredulous that the killer murdered his first daughter – why do it? She was pregnant, they could have gotten married, he could have had the money on the first try… and the third daughter says, no. Everything she knew of you indicated you would cut her off. You know it’s true. We move on quickly from that, but how deftly it was sketched. This powerful man who has lost so much because he didn’t love enough.
I stayed up too late reading this, had a great time, and when I woke up the next morning I went: hang on. I thought it was being telegraphed when the third section begins – when the killer decides to go after the third sister – that she was going to catch him. Not this random guy who got pulled into the second sister’s murder and found it hard to stop digging. I thought that was where the “she’s sharper and weirder than the other two” was going. But I guess it was written in 1953, it wasn’t as much a thing to write about women having agency… what a waste.
Then I thought: is that true? Is it a waste? Was it actually an inferior narrative choice? Or does this disapproval stem purely from my distaste for books where women appear a lot but never as subjects who make plot-consequential decisions? Because while I endorse that distaste, it’s a different thing from the author making a mistake.
After a bit of thinking I concluded: in this case, clearly, yes. I love the random guy as a character, but given the astonishing, hilarious hubris of the antagonist, it’s structurally worse for the novel that the murders were investigated and solved by someone who was pulled in by chance than by the final target. Going after the third sister! Going after the third sister, who is described from the very beginning as the bright one, the weird inward one! For this person to not discover and entrap the murderer personally and get justice for her sisters subverts my expectations, and not in a good way.
I don’t get this way about every book where women don’t do anything. I’ve been reading a lot of Zelazny recently. Zelazny’s women never do anything and I find this fine as long as I’m not reading too many books like that in a row. I get much more heated when such an oversight makes the story worse. Ira Levin didn’t have to make up an unrelated guy to bring in!! His own character was right there!!