IRA LEVIN – A Kiss Before Dying. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1953. Edgar Award, Best First Mystery, 1954. Paperback reprints include, among others: Pyramid R-1067, Green Door Mystery, 1964; Pocket, May 1991 (both shown). Films: United Artists, 1956 (Robert Wagner, Joanne Woodward); Universal, 1991 (Matt Dillon, Sean Young).

   I really try to organize my reading, but basically I’ve always been a slave to my own whimsy. So when I caught a passing reference somewhere to Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying, I returned once again to those thrilling days of yesteryear (i.e., books I read in High School) and I’m glad I did.

   Kiss is a classic of the form known as the Inverted Mystery: we know who-done-it and how, the fun is in seeing how they do it and whether they’ll get caught.

   Levin’s anti-hero is a perfectly-sketched sociopath determined to marry a wealthy heiress, but when he gets her pregnant, rather than endure the stigma that will alienate her father — this is 1953, remember — he decides to kill her and free himself to pursue another, a path not completely free of some suspenseful complications deftly tossed in by a writer who knows how to toss them.

   And things get even better in the second half when our hero finds himself the target of a plucky young heroine and a fan of Leslie Charteris. It’s touches like this, the odd bits of eccentric background thrown in, that really put Kiss across, and I’m glad I had a chance – forty years after I first read this — to visit it again.