PaperBack: “A Kiss Before Dying”

Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.



A Kiss Before Dying, by Ira Levin (Signet, 1954).
Cover illustration by George Ziel.

First Mailer, Now This

From the Associated Press:

Best-selling writer Ira Levin, whose genre-hopping novels such as the horror classic “Rosemary’s Baby” and the Nazi thriller “The Boys from Brazil” provided meaty movie roles for Mia Farrow and Laurence Olivier, has died of a heart attack, his agent said Tuesday.
The 78-year-old Levin, who also wrote for television and Broadway during his long career, passed away in his Manhattan apartment on Monday, agent Phyllis Westberg said.

The AP quotes Newsweek writer Peter S. Prescott as saying that Levin’s novels were “[u]tterly without nutritive value and probably fattening, yet there’s no way to stop once you’ve started.” I remember experiencing that same compulsion with The Boys from Brazil, which I read as a teenager--in one long sitting.

(Hat tip to Sarah Weinman.)

READ MORE: “Ira Levin, Author of Hit Mystery Play Deathtrap, Dies at 78,” by Robert Simonson (Playbill); “Ira Levin Gone?” by Ruth Jordan (Central Crime Zone); “Rosemary’s Daddy,” by Kevin Guilfoile (Chicago Tribune); “Grand Eulogies Today--But Who Will Read Them Tomorrow?” by Sarah Weinman (The Guardian).