Narrated by a small-town doctor named Bickleigh, Malice Aforethought is a powerful portrait of a mind slowly disintegrating under intolerable stress. Bickleigh is trapped in an unhappy marriage, and his misery leads him inexorably from flirtation to a love affair and from adultery to what he believes, mistakenly, to be the perfect murder. There is no mystery in Malice Aforethought to tempt the reader's interest. From the novel's earliest pages, we know the perpetrator of the crime and, to some extent, his motives for committing it. Iles assumes, rightly, that his readers will be as interested in seeing, from the inside, the slow progression of Bickleigh's mental deterioration as in solving the kind of puzzle that detective novels of the era usually presented. Set in a claustrophobic society where snobbery is rampant (Bickleigh's wife believes that she has married beneath her and loses no opportunity of letting her husband know this), Malice Aforethought works so well because it allows readers to understand, and indeed sympathize, with a man driven to murder by the sense that his life has become a prison and he has only one chance of escape.

Francis Iles was one of the pseudonyms of Anthony Berkeley Cox who, as Anthony Berkeley, wrote a series of English detective novels featuring an amateur sleuth and crime novelist called Roger Sheringham. The self-satisfied and nosy Sheringham is the occasionally irritating hero of books which work as both affectionate parodies and ideal exemplars of the standard detective novel of the inter-war years. In Malice Aforethought, Berkeley Cox produced a very different kind of book - one which pioneered the kind of psychological crime story now practiced by so many writers, from Ruth Rendell to Minette Walters. More than seventy years after its first publication, it remains a highly original and absorbing novel.

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