Book description
On a balmy summer's day in 1930 the great and the good of the county
are out in force for the annual, much-anticipated tennis party at the
Bickleighs, although not everyone has much enthusiasm for the game. The
tennis party exists for other reasons - and charmingly mannered
infidelity is now the most popular pastime in the small but exclusive
Devonshire hamlet of Wyvern's Cross.
Which is why, in his own garden, the host, Dr Edmund Bickleigh, is
desperately fighting to conceal the two things on his mind: a mounting
passion for Gwynfryd Rattery - and the certain conviction that he is
going to kill his wife... Francie Iles was the pseudonym for Anthony
Berkeley Cox. The main body of his work comprises the crime novels he
wrote as 'Anthony Berkeley', which primarily feature the amateur
detective Roger Sheringham. However, it is for his two masterpieces,
Malice Aforethought
and Before the Fact
, both written as Francis Iles, that he is most famous. With these
innovative novels he turned the crime genre on its head, by revealing
the identity of the murderer from page one. The reader was thus led not
on a trail of clues to uncover the killer's identity, but into the mind
of the murderer himself. With the emphasis on character rather than
plot, Iles was the father of the psychological suspense novel as we know
it today. Peter Lovesey, for example, states: 'In Malice Aforethought
Francis Iles created the modern crime novel.' Iles was also a literary
reviewer for the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times and, in later life,
the Guardian. He died in 1971, aged 77.
