Malice Aforethought by Frances Iles

 

Simon insists that I have read this before, sometime in the early 90s.  It's possible but it all seemed new to me as I was reading this this past week. I think he's confusing this book with Before the Fact, which I know I read and was written by Iles (and was made into the film Superstition by Hitchcock). But until time travel is invented, we'll never know.

It's amazing that Frances Iles is really Anthony Berkely Cox who wrote all the Roger Sheringham mysteries (of which there are a dozen at least).  The Sheringham stories read like Bertie Wooster Turns His Idle Hands to Criminal Detection. But with no Jeeves to keep him focussed and ensure success.  Instead, Sheringham blithely stumbles along, usually getting the answer completely incorrect and pissing a lot of people off in the process.  And then, almost as an after thought, the killer is discovered and everything works out for the best.  Cox must have written the two Iles books when he was feeling particularly jaded with humanity as this book and Before the Fact are nasty.  The main character is doctor Bickleigh who, we discover, practices medicine in a tiny town where he is much beloved--except by his wife.  Indeed, no one loves his wife, not even her family of origin.  She makes it plain every chance she gets that she only married him to escape a miserable family household.  You'd think she'd be more grateful or at least make at effort at being polite.  She's not even pretty.  At every opportunity parts of her body (like her chin and eyebrows) are described as "thick" or "heavy."  

The story is written from Bickleigh's point of view so we know what he knows.  The problem is that he is an inverterate liar: he lies to everyone else and to himself.  So we can't trust him at all.  Moreover, he's convinced he's smarter than everyone else--not in terms of knowing more stuff but in terms of having the ability to outmanipulate everyone.  Every conversation is an opportunity to plant a seed in another's mind so they slowly have only those beliefs that advantage him.

The very first sentence of the book lets us know that Bickleigh has decided to murder his wife.  Giggling with excitement, Bickleigh congratulates himself for being so much smarter than everyone else because, unlike the typical murderers who kill their wives, he knows he will get away with it.  Unsurprisingly, not long after having made the decision to kill his wife, Julia, he realizes that there are other people in the village that "need to be murdered, too."  Idle fantasy?  Not at all.  No sense in doing things half-assed, after all. If you decide to murder your wife so you can be happy, it stands to reason you need to eliminate ALL the people who bring unhappiness into your life.  Pretty soon our little Dr. Bickleigh has all sorts of irons in the fire, planning drug overdoses and botilism poisoning along with a tidy collection of alibis and character witnesses.  And when he isn't incubating poison he's having attacks in the middle of the night when he suddenly wakes in a fevered panic because he's certain that "everyone knows everything and the net is closing in"!  But, in the morning light, he is calm and laughs at his own silliness--imagine being worried that he would be caught!  Ridiculous!

It really is an incredible story--a a very fast read that is impossible to put down. It was published in 1931 and reviewed as "the best English shocker ever written."  That may be hyperbole but it is easily in my top 5 psychological thrillers masked as a cozy murder mysteries.