A Kiss Before Dying

A Kiss Before Dying is a novel by the American writer Ira Levin, published in 1953. It won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and it has been adapted for the cinema twice.

Burton Corliss is a young man with a ruthless appetite for rising above the manufacturing town he grew up in. He serves in the Pacific during the war, and the moment that shapes him comes when he wounds and then kills a Japanese sniper who begs him for mercy; the power he feels in that moment, mixed with disgust, tells him what he is. He is intelligent, charming and entirely without scruple, and he knows how to present a good face to the people whose help he needs.

He returns home, enrols in college and meets Dorothy Kingship, whose father owns a copper fortune. Corliss becomes her lover in order to get close to the family, and his problem becomes a pregnant woman who loves him. The novel keeps a cold eye on its central figure, at a point when American crime fiction was beginning to take the killer's own psychology as its subject.