A Kiss Before Dying

This book is absolutely lovely. From Levin's perfectly balanced prose, through the well-rounded characters, to the masterful tension maintained throughout. The only thing I didn't like was that it has a (mostly) happy ending, with the antagonist being poetically defeated thanks to the hard work and cunning of a clever amateur detective. In terms of genre, it mostly jumps between being a detective story (which usually demands a neatly wrapped-up ending to some degree) and a crime story (which just demands a bloody ending, not necessarily a neat one). Not that the two can't coexist, and they do so very well in this novel, but the ending seems to try for both. Especially when considering that final chapter, which reintroduces some messiness (what will they tell Bud's mom?) after everything was tied up with a bow in the preceding chapters (Bud dies, but accidentally - nobody needs to get their hands dirty - and there's a perfectly timed callback to his wartime exploits outlined in chapter 2).

The last sentence is absolutely perfect, and the fact that I dislike the neatness of the ending is mostly down to taste. I just don't like the implicit message that evil men don't get away with it. It just feels very John Wayne to me. I prefer the messy amorality of authors like Jim Thompson and James M. Cain, where evil men get punished by accident, or by themselves, or not at all. But that's the thing: Ira Levin is not a crime author or noir author at heart. He is a suspense author, and the suspense in this case happened to overlap enough with the noir genre that it looks just like the real thing if you squint. But that ending gives it away; it presents the world as a fundamentally moral one, where bad people get what's coming to them. I personally prefer my fictional justice to be a bit more random.

It works perfectly as a suspense novel, it's just not truly noir. That's all.