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Malice Aforethought - The Story of a Commonplace Crime: A Positronic Book
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781515471189
Publisher: Positronic Publishing
Published: Jan 1 2027
Pages: 264
Weight: 0.79
Height: 0.55 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Dr. Edmund Bickleigh is a respectable country physician, pleasant enough to his neighbors and thoroughly miserable in his marriage. His domineering wife Julia never lets him forget that she considers herself his social superior, while Bickleigh seeks consolation in a succession of affairs. Eventually resentment hardens into something much more dangerous: he decides that life would be considerably better if Julia were dead.
Francis Iles turns the conventional murder mystery inside out. The reader knows almost immediately who intends to commit the crime; the suspense comes from watching Bickleigh plan it, carry it out, justify it to himself, and attempt to survive the consequences. What begins as calculated murder becomes an increasingly intricate psychological struggle in which vanity, desire, jealousy, fear, and simple human error prove every bit as dangerous as physical evidence.
Darkly funny, disturbing, and remarkably modern in its fascination with the criminal mind, Malice Aforethought helped establish the psychological crime novel as an alternative to the traditional whodunit. Iles transforms a seemingly ordinary English community into a study of concealed hostility and moral corruption, creating a story in which the central mystery is not who committed the murder, but how far an apparently commonplace man will go once he decides that murder is the solution to his problems. The novel was first published in 1931 and is recognized as an important early example of the inverted detective story.
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