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Title: A Kiss before Dying. (Lernmaterialien) by Ira Levin, F. H. Cornish ISBN: 3-19-002686-6 Publisher: Max Hueber Verlag Pub. Date: 01 June, 2000 Format: Paperback

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Average Customer Rating: 4.38 (13 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: One of my favorite stories
Comment: I've read almost all of Ira Levin's works, and this is definitely my favorite. Simply written, yet deeply clever, this book will draw you into the antagonist's brilliant and greedy plan, and it won't let you go. I read it in a day and a half. Please don't be dissuaded by the two horrible movies based on this book. I give the book a 9, and the movies a 1.5. This book will not dissappoint!

Rating: 5
Summary: One of the best suspense novels outside of Cornell Woolrich!
Comment: Stephen King once commented about author Ira Levin: "Every novel he has ever written has been a marvel of plotting. He is the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel; he makes what the rest of us do look like those five-dollar watches you can buy in the discount drug stores." He went on to lament that Levin's most effective book (and his first!), "A Kiss before Dying," is not much read these days.

Here's your chance to fix this situation! "A Kiss before Dying" is now back in print, in a nice trade paperback, for the first time since the early 90s (when a mass-market paperback was briefly available to tie-in with the forgotten movie adaptation starring Sean Young and Matt Dillon). First published in 1953 when Levin was only twenty-three, "A Kiss before Dying" is one of the most remarkable suspense novels ever penned and a masterpiece of literary noir. The greatest suspense writer of all time, Cornell Woolrich, highly influenced Levin, and this book seems like an overt homage to many of Woolrich's devices. It's the only suspense novel I know of that honestly compares with the master.

To tell much about the plot would ruin the shocks and surprises awaiting you in these pages. Levin hurls out plot twists that genuinely jolt the reader and turn the whole story upside down in moments (King referred to one of the twists as "a real screeching bombsell" of a surprise). The story begins at a large college, where Dorothy Kingship, daughter of a wealthy industrialist, has learned that she is pregnant. Her boyfriend, a handsome, dashing, but callous, calculating, and completely amoral young man is unhappy with the news; he hoped to marry into the rich family as his quick ticket to success, and the uptight Leo Kingship will certainly disinherit his daughter when he finds out about the pregnancy. Dorothy wants to marry right away, not caring if her father cuts her off or not, but her boyfriend starts secretly devising another plan...if only he can make it look like suicide...

And that's merely the beginning. The book takes so many u-turns and switchbacks that you'll spend most of your time reading it shaking with tension. Levin crafts his three central set-pieces using minute detail that makes for agonizing suspense. He lets the reader in on the secrets of the story bit by bit, but the more you know, the tenser the story becomes. Sometimes, you know the WHAT and WHO of a situation, but not the WHEN or HOW. At other times, you know the WHAT and WHEN but not WHO. Levin will drive you nearly mad in places! King is right: Levin's plotting is so ingenious it's like workings of a perfect machine.

But beyond plot machinery, Levin dazzles in another area: characterizations. Like Woolrich, Levin can create haunting portraits of lonely souls, and frightening sketches of soulless killers. "A Kiss before Dying" is pure noir: a world of sad people aching for real love and of people who find that killing is no more difficult than putting on a jacket. This is not a "snack food" suspense novel like you find sitting on bestseller shelves. This is a novel that will stay with you for a long time.

It's unfortunate that Levin has written so few novels since (he didn't write his second novel, "Rosemary's Baby" until fourteen years later; he spent the time between as a writer for TV and Broadway stage). Everything he has written is worth reading (check out "The Stepford Wives," "The Boys from Brazil," "Sliver," and his hit play "Deathtrap"), but "A Kiss before Dying" is his art at its best. Don't miss it.

Rating: 5
Summary: a terrific, very readable story ... one of Levin's best
Comment: Ira Levin is one of my favorite writers. While his stories are a bit far-fetched (as with "Rosemary's Baby", "The Boys From Brazil", and "The Stepford Wives") they are always entertaining. His first book, "A Kiss Before Dying", is now largely forgotten (..it was written nearly 50 years ago) but seems remarkably fresh.

In "A Kiss Before Dying" we have a a rich college girl and her gold-digging boyfriend in a dilemna. The girl is pregnant and the choice ahead is grim: either get married and lose daddy's money, or risk an illegal abortion (remember this book takes place circa 1950). She prefers the former, he the latter. The outcome of this dilemna is unexpected (no spoilers here), and the story then really kicks into gear. Yes, in true Levin form the plot is a bit contrived. But it is deliciously readable.

Bottom line: strongly recommended.