“It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr Bickleigh took any positive steps in the matter” is the striking opening sentence of Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles, published in 1931. It is one of the most memorable novels of the golden age of crime fiction.
It is an early example of a new kind of crime novel, where the identity of the criminal is known right from the beginning. It predates Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die by some years.
The suspense of the story is therefore not “whodunnit?” but more “how exactly will he go about it and will he get away with it?”. There is a darkly comic tone, and a realistic presentation of a believable world. This is definitely not a puzzle-plot detective story. Detectives do appear, but the would-be perpetrator is the central figure.
The 1920s social world of rigid class divisions is carefully evoked and slyly satirised. At the opening tennis party the real game being played is not the one on the court. “One does not have to listen to gossip in a place like Wyvern’s Cross. It inserts itself into the consciousness somehow, quite irrespective of the ears.”
In this small north Devonshire village, Dr Edmund Bickleigh is trapped in a loveless and sexless marriage to Julia. She comes from a decaying aristocratic family and only married him to escape the family home. He married her to improve his social status. She looks down on him and he has become the archetypal henpecked husband. Helped by his father, Bickleigh has risen from humble origins to qualify as a doctor. But the social conventions of this era judge a person not by what they have done, but by who they are.
He has many dalliances with local girls, to which Julia turns a blind eye. He is something of a fantasist, and when the wealthy Madeleine Cranmere comes to live in the village, believes he has met “the one”. Unfortunately, Madeleine is a self-dramatising fantasist herself. It is when Julia tells Edmund that Madeleine is merely playing with him and refuses him an amicable divorce that his thoughts turn to murder.
He ponders long and hard before he comes up with what seems like the perfect plan, that can never be detected as murder. We are shown how he puts this into operation in great detail. However, at the very moment when it seems he has succeeded, he makes a crucial mistake, seemingly unnoticed. This adds another layer of suspense to the rest of the novel. There are many surprises ahead before the end, both for the Doctor and the reader. The biggest twist of all is reserved for the very last page.
Bickleigh acts with chilling detachment towards his wife as his carries out his plan to make her a morphine addict. It is as if he is not responsible for her plight at all. For most of the time, he is able to hide the murderous rage inside himself, but it spills over when he hits Ivy, his trusting and innocent former girlfriend. As he drives away, he realises that he enjoyed doing it.
Dr Bickleigh is the main character and we see him from the inside, but the novel is written in the third person, so Francis Iles is also able to keep a critical distance from him. We watch both horrified and amused as Bickleigh retreats further into his fantasy vision of himself. He thinks he has been transformed from a downtrodden nonentity into a Nietzschean superman. He relishes the feeling that he holds the power of life and death over anyone who crosses him. It turns out that he is sadly mistaken. After all, this is subtitled “The story of a commonplace crime”.
There is hardly a sympathetic character in this novel. Even the solicitor who is the only one to suspect what Bickleigh has been getting up to is not really a very pleasant person. But the twists and turns and the horrible fascination we feel for the doctor himself, make it a really compelling read.
It was adapted for television by the BBC in 1979 with a career-best performance by the late Hywel Bennett as Bickleigh. This is much better in every way than the later ITV version.
The Good Reader 