Ira Levin: another masterclass
I have to confess the closest I’ve got to the American novelist/playwright, Ira Levin, is watching the film of The Stepford Wives during a period of convalescence. But given the stature of the man, I decided I really ought to remedy this and read some of his books for myself.
He was a mere 23 years of age when, in 1953, his first book, A Kiss before Dying, was published. It was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece in the crime-thriller genre, winning prizes and selling in eye-watering numbers. And it’s quite short – yeahhh! So that’s the one I decided to tackle first. Tackle? Says a lot about my overall approach, huh?
It was anything but. Accessible, gripping, masterfully plotted and written. And compulsive. Short chapters, and division into three parts, give added momentum. I easily finished it in a day in between wallpapering and weeding and cooking.
The story’s set in a small college campus. In Part 1 we see things from the perspective of the nameless murderer – blond, blue-eyed, handsome, street-wise, charming and a lady-killer in both senses. But also a gold-digger and a psychopath. We know he despises women and only wants them for what they can give him. In the first 84 pages we watch him manipulate and scheme to get rid of Dorothy Kingship aka Dorrie, a girl with a hefty inheritance and a baby on the way, who has dared – yes, dared in a most inconsiderate way – to thwart his plan to get rich quickly. We see him carefully and methodically get rid of her, completely confident the murder will be declared a suicide, and no one will ever know. And the effect is the more clever because we are in on the build up, the increasing threat of violence, but the actual moment of murder is left to our imaginations. So far, so fairly standard plotting.
But then comes the clever bit: a complete change of point of view. Part 2 sees Dorrie’s sister, Ellen Kingship, piecing together aspects of the circumstances that simply don’t add up. She’s convinced Dorrie didn’t take her own life. But how to prove it? She knows the man in question is a blond and handsome student in Dorrie’s cohort at college … but which one? Plenty of young men on the campus fit that description. And how can she trace him without endangering her own life? Approaching each potential blond suspect with a tissue of lies is fraught with peril. Was his the hand that pushed her sister so violently? Was his the smile that watched his ‘problem’ plummet from that 14th storey? As readers we grow increasingly tense as each betraying slip of Ellen’s tongue is detected through blue blue eyes, magnified by a suspicious brain. And who’d have thought torn paper snowflake crafting could be so spine chilling?
The body count increases. The murderer grows ever more audacious, intrepid, and bold. And now, we the readers know who he is.
Part 3 turns its focus on Marion, the third and last Kingship sister – our murderer’s last hope of inheriting a fortune. But there’s one blond handsome man who knew Ellen better, genuinely cared for her, and he is determined to bring this psychopath to justice, and save Marion from his clutches. Meticulously, incrementally, he obtains the evidence, by fair means or foul, and the net closes inch by agonising inch. Levin achieves a finale so tightly coiled and slowly released as to warrant the accolade from no less a personage than Stephen King: ‘the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel …. Every novel he has ever written has been a marvel of plotting … he makes what the rest of us do look like those five-dollar watches you can buy in the discount drug store’.
Oh, and even in his debut novel, a mere stripling, Levin had the confidence to describe Ellen running down 14 storeys and through deserted night streets in one long breathless 24-line sentence! Impressive stuff.
Treats in store …
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