A Kiss Before Dying is a 1953 novel written by Ira Levin. It won the 1954 Edgar Award, for Best First Novel. I'll say first of all that I have never been as disappointed in a book as I was in this one before I even started reading it. It was however, my own fault. I have no idea why I own this book, it doesn't look like the type of book I would buy, but there it was next on the shelf so I started reading. Now for some reason I thought this was a mystery, and I love mysteries, that's where my disappointment came in before the first chapter began. On the back of the novel I read this paragraph:"As a young co-ed's impossible suicide note leads her sister deeper into a peril she cannot understand, the author brilliantly traps the reader in mounting horror and suspense--with a stunning climax that made The New Yorker call it "a pleasure to recommend."So from that line I find that the co-ed is dead, suicide or not, and her sister is trying to figure out why she killed herself which is becomming dangerous to her, so there's probably someone who doesn't want her to know the truth. That's pretty much of the plot to know before opening the book, then I open it and on the inside cover it says:"The lines at the marriage license window in the Municipal Building had been too long. While they waited, he suggested they go up to the roof--'We can see for miles.'Fourteen stories above the street they sat on the parapet edging the roof. He eased himself down, swung in front of her. His hands moved to her knees, cupped them.'We'd better be going, hadn't we, darling?' she said.'In a minute baby. We still have time.'His hands moved down over the silken swell of her calves -- then, with cobra speed, he ducked, hands streaking down to catch her heels -- stepped back and straightened up, lifting her legs high.For one frozen instant, their eyes met...."By now I am extremely disappointed, what could possibly be the mystery? It certainly seems like the young co-ed and her boyfriend were on a roof and he threw her off. Now the sister is going to show up and either the boyfriend will kill her or she will kill him, that's not much of a mystery.Oh well, now I start the book and in the first chapter I find that our perhaps suicidal co-ed is Dorothy Kingship the youngest daughter of the wealthy Leo Kingship, owner of Kingship Copper Incorporated. Her father is very rich and very strict. As the story begins Dorothy has just told her boyfriend that she is pregnant, hoping that he won't be too angry and that he will want to marry her. He reacts quite differently however, he is sure that if they marry right away and under these circumstances, her stern, conservative father will disinherit her. Dorothy's boyfriend has no intention of marrying her without her father's blessing and more importantly her father's money. I will say that the events leading up to Dorothy's fall/jump/push off the roof were very suspenseful. The only mystery in this first section of the book I couldn't seem to figure out comes at the very end, another young woman living in the same building as Dorothy tells how on the morning of the suicide Dorothy had come to her to borrow a belt saying her belt buckle was broken. The woman lends her belt to Dorothy only to find it laying on Dorothy's desk after her death. It seems like she borrowed the belt but didn't wear it. That was puzzling. The day of her death Dorothy's sister Ellen receives a suicide letter from her, so everyone is convinced that it was a suicide and the first section ends.The second section begins with Ellen on her way to Dorothy's college. It is a year after her sister's death and she is convinced that there is more to her sister's death than they know. The motive for the suicide is believed to be that Dorothy was pregnant and abandoned by the man who fathered the child she threw herself from the building. Now Ellen wants to find this man. She had received a letter from Dorothy a few months before her death mentioning a man she had met in her English class, a tall, blond, blue-eyed man. She told her sister that this was "the real thing". That is all the information Ellen has and she is determined to find him, she doesn't even know his name. It is at this point of the book that I realize that I've been led all through the first section and well into the second section before I realized that I didn't even know his name. Just that made the book seem brilliant.I'm not sure how much more I want to say of the plot, I don't want to give too much away. The second section when Ellen goes to the college and finds the names of the handsome, blue-eyes, blond haired men in Dorothy's class was so suspenseful, and as she checks them out one by one we don't know which one it is. When we find out at the end of the section who the killer is, I must say I was totally surprised.The third section I didn't enjoy as much, so far I found our villian pretty brilliant and thought he might actually get away with it, but by the third section he was definitely pushing his luck. It certainly kept me reading and involved in the story, even when I knew where it was going to end, right up to the last page. Maybe I'd read it again some day, I'm not sure because now all the surprises are known. Three and a half stars if they'd let me.
If at first you don't succeed, get rid of the bitch and move on to the next sister.A Kiss Before Dying is a taut little thriller about a sociopath who conceives an ingenuous plan to seduce the daughter of a wealthy copper baron. Except she goes and gets pregnant before his plan can come to fruition. Since Daddy is the moralistic disinheriting type, he figures a kid before they are properly married and he's had time to work his charms and soften the old man up will just ruin everything. When he can't persuade her to get rid of it, he's left with only one option - a well-planned murder in which he manages to make it look like a suicide, and then avoid any connection between him and the dead girl.Which allows him to move on to daughter #2.But daughter #2 proves a little too intuitive — she starts putting clues together and realizing her sister didn't commit suicide, and wants to find out who murdered her. She figures everything out just a little too late.And our boy, as long on audacity as he is short on scruples, decides third time's the charm: the rich industrialist had three daughters, and after all that research he did to seduce the first two, he knows the oldest sister pretty well...As improbable as this story may sound, I couldn't really spot any plot holes. Sure, our protagonist needed a bit of luck here and there, but nothing so overwhelmingly coincidental as to be completely implausible. He's just a meticulous, cold-blooded schemer with a knack for manipulation.A lot of people want books with "relatable" protagonists. Well, the protagonist of this book is a murderous, gold-digging sociopath. You want him to trip up and get caught, and you want his victims to get away, and at the same time, the exciting part is finding out how he's going to get away with it.This book is dated now — it was written in 1954 and it's set in the early fifties, so the campus life described, and the so-visible class distinctions are not the same now, but that just makes this suspenseful novel a period piece as well. In fact, some of the period details are what made it interesting. For example, there is surprisingly little moralizing about the proposed abortion — she doesn't want to do it, but it seems more for emotional reasons than any real ethical or religious qualms. And it struck me that in some ways, the "boy from the wrong side of the tracks" was a thing that would be even harder to envision today — nowadays, we like to pretend that American society is less class-stratified, but that's because the rich are increasingly distant and out of sight. Working class people just don't socialize, at all, with the very wealthy, which makes it easier for us to pretend that there is no such thing as class.Ira Levin also wrote other thrillers, like Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives, and with this pacey, suspenseful novel, it's easy to see how readily his stories became a part of pop culture. Definitely worth reading, and motivated me to read more by him someday.
What do You think about A Kiss Before Dying (2003)?
This is the story of what happens when a girl gets pregnant and the boy will do whatever he can to make sure she's not a burden on him.Boys will do anything for the nookie. And money.I recently watched the 1956 movie based on this book, the one with Robert Wagner and Joanne Woodward, the one I had never connected to this book. I watched it anyway but picked up the book from the library afterwards, thinking there might be some differences. There really weren't any. What you see in the movie is almost exactly the same as the book. The few differences were probably made out of ease of filming or casting, though there was the addition of Joanne Woodward taking a awkward topple off a set of bleachers in the movie that didn't show up in the book. I don't know why, but I really hoped that scene would be in the book. Primarily because the scene in the movie was really strange.Also: Robert Wagner is creepy. Even before his possible hand in the death of Natalie Wood years later, Wagner did creepy like no one's bidness.This is a quick read, one recommended for anyone who likes reading thrillers. I didn't think I'd get through it in pretty much one sitting, but I did. And, again, watching the movie first didn't really spoil anything for me.
—El
A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin is a prime example of how mysteries were written. Before CSI and the overload of forensic science became the norm for a good crime/mystery. This tale is as much about the drama of the characters as it is about the crimes themselves."...His plans had been running so beautifully, so goddamned beautifully, and now she was going to smash them all. Hate erupted and flooded through him, gripping his face with jaw aching pressure. That was all right though; the lights were out. And she, she kept on sobbing weakly in the dark, her cheek pressed against his bare chest, her tears and her breath burning hot. He wanted to push her away..."Every young man makes a plan and he has made one for his whole future. For his life beyond the small town he grew up in and the traps that had befallen his friends and his father. Trapping him in a dead end job with an unhappy wife and a dead end life. That was not for him. That was why he was gone into the military and then to college. For his future. For his life and she was about to take that all away from him. But he wasn't going to let that happen, he wasn't going to let her take that all away from him."...It still wasn't too late. People wrote suicide notes and then stalled around before actually doing it. He looked at his watch; 9:20. The earliest Ellen could get the note would be...three o'clock. Five hours and forty minutes. No step by step planning now. It would have to be quick, positive. No trickery that counted on her doing a certain thing at a certain time. No poison. How else do people kill themselves? In five hours and forty minutes she must be dead..."A Kiss Before Dying was written back in 1953. The stark differences in a crime novel then and what is now are startling. This is beyond pretend noire. This is the real thing. This is from when Hitchcock reigned supreme and not someone that gets a honorable mention in film class. The subtleties, the pacing, the slow build of tension until when the killer is unveiled and the scope of his plan becomes clear. This is what writing was and should have always been. There is some violence in this tale but actually very little of it. It is not the act of murder itself that holds importance, but the motive and the slow unraveling of the crime that on the surface, seems to be one thing but is in essence, only the strand in a much larger web of blood and deceit.Levin is an accomplished author whose tales of crime and horror are now classics. The Boys From Brazil. The Stepford Wives. Rosemary's Baby. You've heard of them and you owe it to yourself as a reader to enjoy them. A Kiss Before Dying is another such novel. A very good read.
—Albert
2.5 stars.Well, it wasn't that bad actually. They are actually a few moments in the book that I really I liked. However, the book as a whole didn't quite achieve the kind of effect that would have made it memorable. This is just another quick reading to pass the time except in my case, it wasn't. The longer the storytelling went, the quicker I fell to sleep. Nope, certainly didn't work out for me. I had had my hope though. What you need to know is it definitely piqued on my interest when I started reading A Kiss Before Dying. The classic premise this story is based on about a gold digger searching for rich girls undoubtedly holds its lure for me. The story started rather well, actually. We were first introduced to this handsome young man who had got his eyes set on the inheritance of this girl, Dorothy who he was currently dating. Only that his plan came with quite an unexpected hitch; Dorothy was pregnant and she would be disinherited if her father found out. This young man was angry alright. Angry with himself but mostly with the girl. So, he began to plan. Hence, one thing lead to another. I can't say much without revealing the plot but I was mostly hooked for the first two parts of the book. What I liked best about this book is how Levin's introduces the main character to his readers. I think it was quite brilliant. I didn't even realize Levin didn't put a name to his antagonist until I was well into the second part of the story which I cannot comment any further in the fear of spoiling the story for you. But man oh man, that was brilliant. I was like, "No, it couldn't be. I was sure Levin mentioned this guy's name on the first part of the book." But of course, when I leafed through the pages again, none of the 84 pages of them mentioned this guy's name except for the excessive use of pronoun "he". Not that I'm complaining though. Like I said, it was brilliant and it certainly added up more bone-chilling suspense to this book. The young man himself made quite a fascinating read. He became the man he was because of the way he was raised. Indirectly, A Kiss Before Dying emphasizes on the important of raising a family correctly. As interesting as this book could get, it was also tedious. The book was quite out of proportion, truth to be told. It was a loooooong read before the story reached its climax and it wasn't until the third part of the book. A little bit overkill, won't you say? Mainly, the first two parts of the books served to highlight how desperate and mean this young man would get which I deem as unnecessary. Therefore, when the story reached its climax, it only had like few pages to go before it ended. Now that totally killed it. If this story were to be revised, I'd suggest the person to start somewhere in Part 2 onwards. I liked Levin's writing style, the story was promising only to fall flat as the end product didn't quite yield the result that I had had in mind. Thus, the 2.5 star rating.
—Nur Ain Z.
