A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin

What a book! Published in 1953, A Kiss Before Dying is a milestone of suspense and crime fiction, and a remarkable debut.

But what really drives other writers nuts is that Ira Levin was only 24 when the book came out, and therefore even younger when he wrote it.

A Kiss Before Dying is the story of a handsome, hard working, ambitious young man. In some ways he's an all-American boy, dreaming very big dreams. Indeed, with his systematic plan of self improvement and his "completely objective list of his qualities, abilities and talents" he's like the Great Gatsby's psychopathic twin.

Psychopathic because he'll stop at nothing to get what he wants.  

And his shortcut to the good life is his scheme to marry the pretty young daughter of a copper tycoon (the company is called Kingship Copper — what a great name). 

She's the perfect target because of her "passive, orphan hunger" for love, and her emotional vulnerability which, he reflects "had something to do with the coldness she felt towards her father." 

He's profoundly psychologically acute (as is Levin) and is meticulously cunning and manipulative, pumping his victim for information so he can draw up a list of his future father in law's likes and dislikes.

But what really drives this novel is the fact that Leo Kingship has three daughters, which leads to an intricate and nail-biting narrative. I'm being a bit coy here because I don't want to give too much away...
  
Besides strong sales (it's never been out of print), the book received rave reviews. Drexel Drake in the Chicago Sunday Tribune called it a "remarkably constructed story" and Anthony Boucher in the New York Times described its "technical whodunit tricks as dazzling as anything ever brought off."  

What they are talking about is Ira Levin's use of unnamed first person narrative to allow the killer to hide in plain sight. When the story's viewpoint then switches to other characters we have no idea who the bad guy is. Or rather, we have some idea, which begins to ratchet up the suspense...

If you haven't read this book, Levin builds in some stunning surprises. Unless some idiot ruins it for you with spoilers — and I don't intend to be that idiot — you are in for a real treat. 

In fact, even if you have read it, it's likely to prove satisfyingly shocking. This was at least my third reading, but details had grown sufficiently vague for me to still be floored by one of Levin's greatest twists.

Since the story is told from three different viewpoints in three sections (one for each sister), the style of the book is allowed to change, smoothly and naturally.

The first part is a chilling internal portrait of the killer — full of slippery self justification. He's a perfectly realised character, narcissistic ("He ran his hand over his hair, wishing there were a mirror"), pitiless and implacable.

The second is a sort of a girl-detective story with a plucky young woman doing some "very cautious Sherlocking." She's smart and appealing and very switched on — she's "seen too many movies where the heroine" foolishly confronts the bad guy and comes to a sticky end. (Interesting that this was already such a cliché in the early 1950s.)

The third section of the book moves to a marvellously evoked New York City (Levin clearly loves his home town) where the killer thinks his goal is at last within reach. He's exultant. "Was there ever such a perfect day?" he asks, foreshadowing the title of a future novel by Levin.

But it's not that simple, chum, and the story becomes a nerve-wracking game of cat and mouse, and also a moving tale of loss as the final thrusts in this chess game are played out, at an immense cost to all concerned.

 A Kiss Before Dying is a great crime novel and a classic of suspense fiction. But it's deeper than that. It's ultimately a human tragedy about a father who unknowingly condemns his daughters to a horrible fate, and three girls who just wanted to find love.

You won't be able to put it down, or forget it once you finish it.

This post is part of a series I'm writing on the complete works of Ira Levin — nine out of ten cats recommend his fine novels! The introduction to this series can be found here. Next up, Rosemary's Baby.

(Image credits: Most of the covers are from Good Reads — the Turkish edition recycles a Tom Adams cover painting for an Agatha Christie book, The Seven Dials Mystery. The Corsair edition with the purple cover is from Hachette Australia. And the Signet with the red cover, the first paperback edition, is from Captain Ahab's Rare Books at ABE. The dustjacket of the original hardcover is from Facsimile Dust Jackets, which is a great resource and a wonderful idea. The photo of the discerning pussy cat inspecting Mr Levin's oeuvre is by yours truly.)

Venom by Pinkner & Rosenberg and Marcel

Venom is a absolutely not any kind of a great movie. But it is vastly better than the trailer for it suggests. Which isn't difficult, because the trailer for Venom must rank as one of the worst of all time...

Not least because it includes the last scene of the film, and the final punchline, with the effect that viewers who have seen the trailer, which will be most of them, finish watching the film on a flat and disappointing note. Nice work, guys.

The trailer also manages to make Tom Hardy look like an idiot, which is unfair since he's a fine actor and here manages to turn in an effective and sympathetic performance in a thankless role as Eddie Brock, a crusading journalist who becomes infected with an alien symbiote or parasite. 

The film is a tad confused about what a "symbiote" is (the word suggests a symbiotic relationship, which is decisively different from parasitism), but that's the least of its problems...

Venom is  fast moving and efficient thanks to director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, Gangster Squad) and a strong cast, including Michelle Williams as Eddie's love interest Anne Weying, Riz Ahmed as the bad guy and Jenny Slate as a conflicted scientist working for the bad guy.

The bad guy being a super rich new-tech entrepreneur. A cliché which dates back at least to 2013's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, where the heavy Chester V was a fun parody of Steve Jobs. Since then the fun has been wearing rather thin, though.

But Venom's real Achilles heel are the special effects used to create Venom and his fellow aliens — lashing tentacles, gleaming pseudopods, gaping maws full of razor sharp teeth... 

These are truly shameful, utterly inadequate and look seriously dated already. In a few years' time they will seem as antiquated and clunky as Donkey Kong game footage from 1981, though without the retro charm.

The script for this Marvel comic adaptation is basically an echo of Nigel Kneale's 1953 Quatermass Experiment – spacecraft returns to earth with alien entity which takes possession of a human. It's by the writing team of Jeff Pinkner & Scott Rosenberg, who worked on the excellent Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, with a rewrite by Kelly Marcel.

I actually met Kelly Marcel because I worked with her dad Terry on a TV show called Dark Knight (no, not that one). She's proving to be one of the most successful British writers in Hollywood, with credits including the adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey (yes, that one).

Venom's best feature is the bickering dialogue between Eddie and the monstrous Venom, whose voice he hears in his head — and which sounds to me like Tom Hardy doing a decent monster voice, with some processing on it.

This is not a movie for the ages but it's a businesslike and professional piece of work and, as I said, far better than the meretricious trailer would lead you to believe.

(Image credits: Plenty of posters at Imp Awards, thank you.)

Mile 22 by Carpenter and Roland

Who would have thought a Mark Wahlberg shoot-’em-up would be of such high quality? I almost missed Mile 22 entirely, but I'm really glad I didn't. 

The movie gripped me from its very first moments, when its opening sequence plunges us into a raid on an innocent-seeming domestic home, which is clearly inspired by Sicario.

But instead of an FBI strike force breaching a cartel safehouse, this is a CIA black ops team cracking open a nest of Russian spies on a leafy all-American street. As Mile 22 unfolds we learn more about James Silva (Wahlberg) and his elite crew so we can begin to care about them...

Just in time for the real mayhem to begin in a fictional Southeast Asian country (actually shot in Bogotá, Colombia) — the fact the film is not set in America is a tremendous asset, and if I'd realised that I would have gone to see it a lot sooner.

Another asset is is the fact that it's so strongly directed by Peter Berg, a first class action director. He made Battleship which — don't laugh — I thought was terrific, and recently directed Wahlberg to great effect in Deepwater Horizon. John Malkovich (who is a welcome presence in Mile 22, as Silva's boss, Bishop) was the heavy in Deepwater Horizon.

Before Deepwater, Berg and Wahlberg collaborated on Lone Survivor, which being a relentless depiction of combat was very tonally similar to Mile 22. The big difference — and the big improvement — here is that Mile 22 has female characters on the team, with the laudable Lauren Cohan and Ronda Rousey, as Alice Kerr and Sam Snow.

It may sound odd, hell it is odd, to claim that having women being shot at in a movie is an upgrade. Yet the fact that our heroes are not an all-male macho testosterone fest makes a huge difference to Mile 22.
 
The movie is written by Lea Carpenter, which may explain the well realised female characters here. She's a novelist whose first book, 11 Days, is currently being adapted for television. 

Her screenplay is based on early draft by herself and Graham Roland who has a prestigious string of television credits, writing for Fringe, Lost, Prison Break and — most pertinently here — the new Tom Clancy series.

Mile 22 is a real surprise. It's an exceptional work, and if violent thrillers are your thing you shouldn't miss it. It even has the temerity to avoid the conventional, triumphal, happy Hollywood ending.

(Image credits: Thank you again, Imp Awards... though they're all a bit monochromatic, aren't they?)

The Predator by Shane Black & Fred Dekker

I owe readers an apology. I should have posted about this movie the instant it appeared on our screens, rather than just as it's disappearing from them...

I tried, though, I really did. I went to the very first screening of The Predator at my local cinema — a preview in deluxe wide screen 3D. Unfortunately it was too deluxe and too 3D for the geniuses at Cineworld Wandsworth. After half an hour, with half the audience in the foyer complaining, and most of the staff in the projection booth trying to get the movie to work... I threw in the towel.

The next few weeks were spent frantically finishing my fourth Vinyl Detective novel. No movies for Andrew then!

All of which is a long winded explanation for why I wasn't singing the praises of this great movie ages ago.

Anyway, The Predator is directed and co-written by Shane Black. I've discussed my admiration for Black — one of the all time great Hollywood screenwriters — in my posts on Iron Man 3 and The Nice Guys, two other films where he served as both director and writer.

The Predator was co-written by Shane Black and Fred Dekker, based on characters created by Jim Thomas and John Thomas in the original Predator movie in 1987. Black & Dekker (I know, I know, but I couldn't resist it) have worked as a writing team before, on the delightful Monster Squad, which also appeared in 1987.

Why is this Black & Dekker movie so great? Well, largely because the characters are so magnificent. Boyd Holbrook plays the main man, Quinn McKenna, but we also have a kick-ass heroine in the shape of Casey Bracket played by Olivia Munn.
 
Casey's a plausible scientist, speculating on everything from the function of the predator's dreadlocks (possibly sensory organs) to the theory that high-functioning autism is the next step in human evolution. But as I said, she can kick ass, so in some very macho company she manages to more than hold her own, and she has some great lines.

Which isn't surprising. Shane Black's dialogue is routinely magnificent. And very funny. "Don't say 'retarded'. That's insensitive. And Quinn's kid is retarded." That show-stopper comes from one of the memorable team of characters who join forces with Quinn in battling the formidable alien invader.

The Predator is kind of a warped, touching, and frequently hilarious variation on the guys-on-a-mission movie. In this case the mission is to stop the predator of the title — although as Casey points out, the bloodthirsty extraterrestrial's behaviour is that of a sports hunter, not a predator at all.

What is really great here is that Black & Dekker have come up with a brilliant device for swiftly allying Quinn with a team of engaging oddballs, all of whom have the necessary combat skills to go after the space-faring bad guy.

And each of these supporting characters have their own distinct back-story. Their own shtick, if you want to be cynical, but they are such engaging and amusing figures that when the body count begins to mount at the end of the movie, it's genuinely heartbreaking.

I can't recommend The Predator highly enough. I just wish I'd caught it early enough to see it two or three times. 

(Image credits: All the posters are from Imp Awards.)

Critic's Choice by Ira Levin

We continue my survey of the writings of the great Ira Levin with another one of his plays. Critic's Choice was his third Broadway production after No Time for Sergeants (1955) a hit comedy; and Interlock (1958), an under-appreciated psychological drama.

Critic's Choice, which appeared in 1960, is again a comedy, and it's an absolute cracker (audiences thought so, too — the show was another hit). Levin here takes up the challenge of writing about a drama critic, Parker Ballantine whose wife Angela has written a play of her own. 

Angela's play is, to say the least, not great. But it is surprisingly fast-tracked into production and bound for Broadway, leaving Parker with the dilemma of what to do. Does he review the play and tell the truth, jeopardising his marriage? Or does he chicken out, and compromise his principles?

The sequences where Angela is happily bashing out her masterwork has a fascinating, and hilarious, parallel in Levin's later triumph Deathtrap — which features two writers in competition rather than a writer and critic warily circling each other.

There is also a pre-echo of Deathtrap in the wickedly funny scene in Critic's Choice where the maid answers the phone and gives a quick summary of where everyone is, in exactly the manner Parker described as a howling cliché.

What's more, Critic's Choice interestingly prefigures Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, both in the egregious clunkiness of the play-within-a-play and (spoiler alert) in the wife's infidelity. 

Yes, Angela has a fling with the director of her play, the marvellously realised Dion Kapakos, a pretentious wunderkind who keeps banging on about "roots" and authenticity. He is, of course, a big phony.

Levin's play is packed with wonderful characters — and they're not just charged with comic potential: everyone is real and solid and three dimensional and has a valid point of view. ("I'm listening to me for a change," says Angela, who is sick of just being a housewife.) 

These characters include Parker's ex-wife Ivy, a glamorous actress, who has just had a flop of her own ("There are some books that simply cannot be made into musical comedies and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is one of them"); his precocious son John, who is a budding critic himself and earns money selling his dad zingers to use in his reviews; and his mother in law Charlotte who advises Parker that if he goes ahead with his review he'll have "more integrity and less wife than any man in town."

Of course, what counts in a comedy is being funny. And Ira Levin hit a home run in this regard. But what really elevates Critic's Choice is some underlying seriousness and  — take note, Dion Kapakos — authenticity. 

It's a mark of distinction that Parker has genuine, and believable, reasons for sticking to his guns and inviting disaster by reviewing his wife's play, rather than just behaving in an arbitrary fashion to suit the needs of the plot.

Surprisingly, the original Broadway production was directed by Otto Preminger, a high-powered movie maker (Anatomy of a Murder, Exodus) who specialised in much more heavy material. Apparently Ira Levin and Preminger met when Levin's first novel, A Kiss Before Dying, was published and the director considered filming it. Levin went on to write an early draft of Preminger's film Bunny Lake is Missing.

Needless to say, Otto Preminger did not direct the Bob Hope and Lucille Ball movie version of Critic's Choice — which I might well report on in this continuing overview of the magnificent Ira Levin.

(Image credits: The very dull Random House cover is from Wikipedia. The Dramatists Play Service edition is from Between the Covers Rare Books at ABE.  The cover and photo from the theatre programme — or theater program — for the London production at the Vaudeville is from my own collection. The Playbill cover is from Amazon. The DVD cover is also from Amazon. The newspaper clipping is courtesy of the official Ira Levin website — many thanks indeed to them for providing this. If you're squinting at it trying to read the caption, it features Preminger, actress Gena Rowlands — who actually dropped out of the play before the opening — and the mighty Mr Levin himself.)

The Sixth Sense by Rosalind Heywood

I am ambivalent, to say the least, on the subject of extra sensory perception. The romantic side of me thinks it would be so cool if such a thing existed. The scientific side shakes its head at the quality of evidence...

But I remain sufficiently interested in ESP to read the occasional book about it. I am very cautious about choosing these, because there is — to quote Fight Club — "an avalanche of bullshit" out there on the subject.

One writer I trusted to discuss the phenomena sensibly was Arthur Koestler. Having exhausted Koestler's writings on it, I've now begun to explore the books by other writers that he recommended.

Chief among these is Rosalind Heywood. The Sixth Sense, published in 1959, is the first of two notable volumes by her. (The second one, which I will also discuss, is The Infinite Hive from 1964.)

The real problem with ESP is that there have been a huge number of experiments, mostly by J.B Rhine at Duke University and concerning boring and repetitious attempts to guess which Zener cards will come up next in a random sequence.

And when analysed, the  dry boring stats showing irrefutable proof for the existence of a paranormal effect.

Or to quote HJ Eysenck, as quoted in this book: "Unless there is a gigantic conspiracy involving some thirty university departments all over the world, and several hundred highly respected scientists in various fields, many of them originally sceptical to the claims of the psychical researchers, the only conclusion that the unbiased observer can come to is that there does exist a small number of people who obtain knowledge existing in other people's minds, or in the outer world, by means as yet unknown to science."

Eysenck also makes a point which is particularly compelling to me. There are some statistical effects which weren't even thought of at the time of the experiments and and only discovered when retrospectively analysing the data.

So to falsify this would itself have required ESP.

There you go. The results are in, and ESP apparently exists. But, but, but...

But is seems that there is nothing to be done with such evidence. No respectable scientist wants to build on this research — and I completely understand why.

So does Rosalind Heywood. "Most scientists prefer to avert their eyes," she says. And she sympathises: "it is not easy to propound new systems based on facts whose natural habitat seems to be through the looking glass..." 

This is characteristic of her often charming and witty style. And Heywood has some valuable insights, too. She makes the important and telling point that creating the right kind of atmosphere is crucial. Which is why Duke got successes when his counterparts in the UK, doing the same kind of experiments, got nothing.

She also discusses how Sigmund Freud started from a point of not believing in the paranormal, yet he encountered sufficiently persuasive evidence to convince him at that telepathy at least was real. But a colleague, Ernest Jones, lobbied hard to prevent Freud from coming out in public with his belief in telepathy. 

Jones was convinced any action like this would seriously damage the reputation of psychoanalysis. And he may well have been right. The upshot was that Freud's paper on the subject wasn't published until years after his death.

This pretty much sums up the scientific position on ESP. Don't talk about it.

So we end where we began, with the dry boring stats showing proof which can't be denied and should not be ignored and everybody, including me, either denying it or ignoring it. 

Rosalind Heywood wrote, "It is hard to doubt that in time answers will be found to the questions raised in this book." 

Nearly sixty years on there's no sign of them.

(Image credits: The pale blue original British hardcover is from ABE. The American hardcover is from Weiser Antiquarian Books. The early British Pan paperback is from Amazon. The Pan reprint is from Tiki. The Penguin reprint with the rather witty Jones Thompson cover design is scanned from the rather battered copy fromy own sweet library.)

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

This book is so great, why didn't someone tell me about it before? The reason I finally got around to reading it was the riveting Radio 4 adaptation of it, scripted by Donna Franceschild. This isn't currently available to listen to, but you can find details here. 

So, what is East of Eden about? Well it's generally described as the saga of two families in California in the late 19th and early 20th Century. 

And therein resides the book's deepest flaw. It's actually the story of one family — the Trasks. That is where all the interest lies. 

For my money, the parallel account of the Hamiltons could virtually be eliminated. I suspect this problem arose largely because Steinbeck didn't have a rigidly fixed plan as to what he was going to write about, so the book — and it's a big book — just grew organically, and in a baggy and misshapen fashion, as he found his way into it.

And in those pre-computer days (it was published in 1953), the prospect of going back when he was finished and cutting out tens of thousands of words and reorganising the book was probably just too daunting. Or maybe he loved the bits about the Hamiltons. They are actually presented as the ancestors of Steinbeck's own family.
 
How true this is — and why the book is so oddly out of proportion — I hope to find out when I get a copy of Steinbeck's Journal of a Novel, The East of Eden Letters.

But to hell with dwelling on the flaws... what makes this book so wonderful? Well, for a start it features one of the greatest villains ever devised in literature, the astonishing Cathy Ames. Cathy becomes the beloved wife of the central character, Adam Trask. But Adam doesn't have a clue who she really is.

Cathy is a classic psychopath. She murdered her parents, plundered the family business and faked her own death. And this was in her early teens... she's just warming up. I won't give too much away, but she ends up abandoning Adam and her two sons when they are babies — as she sets off to leave, he begs her to stay and asks what will become of the tiny boys.

"Throw them in one of your wells," says Cathy. She then goes, adopts a new identity, and takes over a whorehouse in a nearby town.

When and whether Adam and the boys will find out the fate of their mother becomes the suspenseful central question for the book...

Just to give you a flavour of how brilliantly written this novel is, here's a few quotations culled from the dozens I jotted down while reading it. Steinbeck offers arresting descriptions of people and nature and external things...  

As when Adam's mother "smile flashed and disappeared the way a trout crosses a knife of sunshine in a pool."  Adam's son recalls "the clean sage-laced wind from the hills". Or how Cathy's mother made an unpleasant discovery when she pulled the barn doors open "and the bright sun crashed inside." Or how about the image of a "nervous March wind"?

But Steinbeck also describes thoughts and emotions and internal states with great vividness and psychological acuity.

Such as the way, after the terrible trauma of a savage beating, someone "lay in a cave of shock and opium." And when Adam finally begins to have an insight into what Cathy really is, "He thought he could see her impulses, crawling like ants and could read them." And later, of Cathy herself, when she begins to lose her grip, "Her mind drifted among impressions the way a bat drifts and swoops in the evening." Or when he writes of the "black reasoning" of the subconscious mind. 

Steinbeck is a master storyteller. The emotional impact of the book is considerable. The reader's heart lifts when Adam finally gets free of Cathy. But more often our heart is broken, as when Adam's dying mother attributes his loving gifts to Adam's brother instead.

And we're also appalled — by Adam's goggle eyed love for his psychopathic, murdering whore of a wife — or angered, as when Adam refuses his son's gift of money... at this point I held my breath because I knew something terrible was going to happen. And when it did, I thought it served Adam right, the idiot — he brought this tragedy on himself.

But you'll have your own reactions to this great, sprawling, classic novel. It's not perfect, but it's a masterpiece.

And I'll end on a Steinbeck aphorism from its pages which has become a favourite of mine: "There is no dissatisfaction like that of the rich."  

(Image credits: No lack of cover variants, thank heavens, since this is a long post. Indeed, there are so many to be found on Good Reads that — apart from the Pan version, which is the one I read (and scanned myself) — these are just drawn from the Penguin editions of the book. I particularly like the one of Cathy burning down the family home with her parents in it, cunningly designed to look like the American flag.)