LIBBIE BLOCK – Bedeviled. Detective Book Club; hardcover 3-in-1 reprint, July 1947. Hardcover first edition: Doubleday Crime Club, 1947. Paperback reprint: Dell 344 (mapback edition), 1949.

   Surprisingly, this is the only mystery novel that Libbie Block ever wrote — a one-hit wonder, and it is a doozey. Right from the first page. Right from the first sentence: “I am Elizabeth, and I want to kill a woman named Coca Himbert.”

   Elizabeth tells most of the story herself, and it’s like being inside a dis-eased mind, as she slowly becomes aware that her husband, a struggling young classical composer, is being stolen away from her by the maestro conductor’s young wife (this is a recurring pattern) and murder becomes her only solution, an obsession she cannot remove from her mind.

   And when the woman is eventually murdered, Elizabeth confesses, even though she does not actually remember committing the crime. But the police have no other suspect. Did she do it, or can she find the person who did? It’s a mystery like no other I can recall.

   The ending is both crystal clear and morally ambiguous. It’s one that makes you sit back and think — not the sort that makes you trace back the plot to see if all the pieces fit — that’s the part that’s clear — and not the question at all. Definitely a book worth searching out, though probably not easily found.

   [UPDATE] 03-04-08.   I failed to follow through bibliographically when I wrote this, and the last part of the final sentence is incorrect, or at least it is if all you?d like is a copy to read. Copies of the Dell mapback, while collectible, are quite plentiful. You can find many offered for sale online even as I speak. Nor are the hardcover editions all that difficult to come by, but to say something on my own behalf, this review was written before it had become known how common some previously “hard to find” books really were.

   I was correct in saying that this is the only mystery novel that Libbie Block wrote, but she wrote at least four other novels. One of them, Wild Calendar, was the basis for a major Hollywood production, Caught (1949) with James Mason, Barbara Bel Geddes and Robert Ryan. Mostly she seems to have done short fiction, with loads of stories appearing as early as 1934 in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Ladies Home Journal. She died in 1972.

   In any case, I hope I made it clear that I liked Bedeviled, the one mystery novel she did do. I’m going to have to read it again. I made it sound noirish, which may or may not be true, and I’d like to find out. And even more than that, I don’t remember the ending, and I made that sound rather interesting too.

   (It’s funny, but I seldom remember endings, unless it?s something totally Ackroydian in nature. It’s a good thing, I guess, because it allows me to re-read a book with as much pleasure as it did the first time. When it’s not such a good thing, it shows up at times like now. I feel as though I’m typing without really knowing what I’m talking about. Awkward? Yes.)