Analysis
Ira Levin’s career offers worthwhile insights into how an author can successfully utilize tropes and conventions of the mystery genre without producing a single major work that can be labeled a straightforward mystery. Beginning his career in the early post-World War II era, Levin was a pioneer in a trend that continued well into the twenty-first century—one of blending genres and experimenting with conventions not only in highbrow literature but also in popular fiction. With few exceptions, Levin’s most successful works, both with critics and readers, have been skillfully constructed hybrids of at least two genres, with one always being the mystery story, his favorite form of reading as a boy. This combining of genres is evident in his most popular works, Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives.
Levin repeatedly explored the fate of the outsider in a corrupt, inimical environment. The outsiders in Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives are the young wives who are new to the community. In A Kiss Before Dying, both the killer and Marion, the young woman who ultimately escapes him, are quirky and do not fit comfortably into society, and the hero of Levin’s dystopian science-fiction novel, This Perfect Day, is called Chip in a futuristic society where everybody else has one of eight approved names followed by a number, and he has eyes of two contrasting colors in a world where defects and differences have been eliminated.
Rosemary’s Baby
Rosemary’s Baby, Levin’s phenomenal best seller of the 1960’s, is essentially a story of supernatural horror and the occult: a coven of devil worshipers conjure up the Prince of Darkness to impregnate a young housewife, Rosemary Woodhouse, who has just moved into the gloomy apartment house in New York where the cult operates. However, the plot format that Levin employs is taken directly from classic mystery and detective fiction: The protagonist becomes convinced that something sinister is afoot after the death of a young neighbor. As her suspicions grow, she pursues a pathway of investigation typical to mystery tales, involving eavesdropping, unraveling secret identities, solving anagrams, conducting historical research, and perceiving and analyzing subtle clues such as recurring scents and sounds and slight changes in characters’ behavior. Absolutely nothing overtly supernatural is depicted until the very last chapter, which is almost a parody of the final scene of a mystery novel: Rosemary moves through a secret passageway in a closet into a parlor full of all the surviving characters where points of the plot are rehashed and the truth is revealed.
The Stepford Wives
The Stepford Wives employs a similar formula, but this time Levin combines science fiction with mystery conventions. In The Stepford Wives, a heroine very similar to Rosemary moves with her husband to the placid suburb of Stepford, where a misogynist scientist is replacing the women of the town with slavish android replicas. Here, though, Levin seems to play with the conventions of the cozy mystery format such as that used in Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple series. The protagonist finds herself living in a conservative, quiet, seemingly ideal small town in New England but soon picks up numerous clues that something odd is going on, especially in the manor house of the wealthiest and most respected member of the community. Nothing obviously suggestive of science fiction and robotics occurs until the final revelation scene.
A Kiss Before Dying
Levin’s first novel, A Kiss Before Dying , in many ways is seen as his most innovative and surprising work. A taut psychological thriller, it also fits neatly into the mystery subgenre of the inverted narrative that...
(This entire section contains 1304 words.)
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focuses primarily on the killer. The antihero, Bud, is a psychopathic college student who kills quickly and easily to solve whatever problems he encounters. He gets his girlfriend Dorothy pregnant and pushes her off a roof at the Marriage Bureau because he feels that early marriage will interfere with his career. When his girlfriend’s sister Ellen investigates her death and gets too close to the truth, he kills Ellen as well. Then Bud sets his sights on marrying and killing the third sister, Marion, to inherit her share of her wealthy father’s estate. However, this time he is thwarted, and confronted with his crimes, he commits suicide by jumping into a copper smelter with the same offhandedness with which he dispatched his victims.
Despite more sadistic and graphically rendered psychopathic killers in later mystery and crime fiction and film, Bud remains a chilling, creepy literary creation and can easily be taken as the prototype of Norman Bates in Bloch’s Psycho and Patrick Bateman in Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991). This first novel also demonstrates Levin’s love of intricate and surprising plots. In a more conventional crime novel or detective story, after Dorothy’s murder, a heroic protagonist would arrive to play a cat-and-mouse game of confrontation and interrogation with Bud, but when such a figure does arrive in the form of Ellen, the second sister, she too is murdered. The more traditional amateur-sleuth figures, Gordon Gant and the third sister, Marion, do not even figure prominently in the plot until the last third of the novel.
Deathtrap
The longest-running mystery ever to appear on Broadway, Deathtrap is a metafictional parody of the mystery genre that nevertheless supplies its audience with the sorts of surprises and plot twists that mystery fans crave. At least a dozen tropes and conventions of the genre are exploited in the play: secret romance as motive for murder, professional jealousy as motive, fears regarding one’s reputation as motive, murder by heart attack brought on by fear, a culprit’s tricking other people into incriminating themselves by handling weapons and leaving fingerprints, apparent death that turns out to have been faked, conspirators betraying each other, weapons that fail, dark and stormy nights, power failures and blackouts, premonitions of murder, and surprise endings. Nevertheless, with extremely rapid pacing and sardonic dialogue often commenting on the writing of mysteries, Levin manages to surprise the audience with each new twist, even though any mystery fan watching or reading the play will have encountered these conventions hundreds of times previously. As with much parody and metafiction, Deathtrap is difficult to summarize, because—as is typical of Levin’s work—the pleasure of his plot lies not in its construction but in the order and way in which it is revealed.
Deathtrap tells the story of a has-been playwright who seemingly murders a younger man to appropriate a promising mystery play he has written. When the man seemingly rises from the dead, the older playwright’s wife, who has a weak heart, dies of fright. At this point, the audience realizes that the two men are lovers and have conspired to scare the wife to death. However, the older man comes to distrust his younger lover when he discovers that he has written a play based on the murder that they committed. The play ends with both men dead at each other’s hands and a casual visitor in possession of the play.
In addition to spoofing the conventions of the mystery genre, Deathtrap takes satirical jabs at Broadway and the writing profession. Until Deathtrap premiered, Levin had not had a hit play since No Time for Sergeants in the early 1950’s. In the play’s dialogue, jokes abound about the fickleness of the theater-going public, writer’s block, and professional envy among writers. The ironies of Levin’s profession are neatly detailed in the play’s ending: two men have committed murder and betrayed each other in their quest for a hit play, yet the manuscript that eventually does become a Broadway success ends up in the possession of Helga, who merely happened to be visiting in the neighborhood when the crimes were committed.
