As I said in my quiz answer yesterday, I bought this in a charity shop a couple of days ago. I'd never heard of Francis Iles, but, as my learned ex-colleague Rob pointed out yesterday in a comment, this was a pseudonym used by Anthony Berkeley, who also wrote a number of detective novels under his own name. Why the pseudonym, then? Well, think Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine and you'll be on the right track. Rendell's novels typically feature a detective (Wexford) who solves the crime right at the end, while Vine's typically take you into the disturbed mind of the perpetrator (yes I know this is an oversimplification, but you get the point). So too with Berkeley/Iles -- Berkeley created a detective called Roger Sheringham and had him solve a number of crimes, but in this novel, written in 1932, Iles, brilliantly and ground-breakingly, reveals the identity of the murderer in the first sentence: "It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter". From then on, of course, the reader is well and truly grabbed, and waiting for the circumstances that have led to this decision, for the act itself to take place, and for whatever the outcome may be.
The circumstances are soon revealed. Dr Edmund Bickleigh is trapped in an unhappy and celibate marriage to the domineering Julia, who never lets him forget that she has married beneath her. Throughout the ten years of their marriage he has been quietly philandering with various young women in Wyvern's Cross, the country village in which he practices. He has never let himself become too emotionally involved, preferring the thrill of the chase and usually casting the girls off rather quickly after he has caught them. That is, until the appearance of the beautiful, artistic Madeleine Cranmere, with whom Bickleigh falls deeply and desperately in love. His idle fantasies about killing Julia become increasingly real and pressing, and at last he finds what seems to be the perfect means of carrying out the act. But things start to go wrong, and more murders seem to be called for...
The great joy of this novel is in the wonderfully convincing observation of Bickleigh's increasingly bizarre and disturbed mental processes. Initially a rather pathetic fantasist with a tremendous inferiority complex and a talent for self-justification, he slips further and further into a mental world in which he becomes convinced of his ability to commit crimes and get away with them. From time to time, most often during the darkest hours of the night, reality kicks in and he sweats and weeps with panic, but the morning brings renewed confidence and a return of self-congratulation at his cleverness in deceiving the world. I thought him a wonderful character -- he is appalling, in one way, of course, but also I found myself strangely sympathetic towards him at times. The novel is delightfully satirical of the ghastly world of Wyvern's Cross, in which surface respectability frequently hides sexual misbehaviour, and gossip is terrifyingly rife. A great read -- and I also have Iles' second novel, Before the Fact, so more on that soon.
