The moment(s) when I realised Ira Levin was a genius

I love Ira Levin’s novel, The Boys from Brazil, about Nazi expats in South America attempting to resurrect the Third Reich. It’s ridiculous, absolutely preposterous, but also riveting and huge amounts of fun. But there’s a chapter (or should I say a section) exactly halfway through the book that blew me away and made me realise that Levin was a genius, an absolute master, and deserves to be taught in creative writing classes, etc. etc. etc.

It almost reads like Levin got bored. He found the process of writing the book so easy that he had to test himself. And so he gives you a section of pure dialogue. No descriptions. No he said/she said, just pure dialogue. The characters have not entered the story before, and they don’t reappear, and yet we understand everything that happens. We know exactly who they are and what they’re about. And after just five pages of this, a man has convinced a woman to unwittingly plant a suicide bomb next to another man’s hospital bed. We never learn if the plan goes off. We don’t need to know.

Pure. Genius.

I read Levin’s books in the “wrong” order, and just recently I read his first novel, A Kiss Before Dying. I was less interested because I knew it wasn’t one of his high-concept thrillers, just a plain old regular crime thriller. And once again, he blew my socks off.

The novel is broken into three parts, and in the first one we follow a young man as he plots to murder his pregnant girlfriend. In the second part, someone is trying to track down this young man, only they’ve never met him and only have a description. They manage to narrow down their suspects to two young men: Gordon Gant and Dwight Powell. And it was only at this moment that I, the humble reader, realised that I had spent eighty pages from the point-of-view of this young man and yet I had absolutely no idea what his name was. And so, just as I had been completely in his shoes, I was now completely in the shoes of the person tracking him down. They interview both Gordon and Dwight, and just like them, I had no idea which one he was.

Pure. Genius.

Levin deserves to be better read, better known, better remembered, and worshipped by all who write thrillers. They’re short too. All less than three hundred pages, and The Stepford Wives is only three chapters. Three! And let’s not forget that he’s a feminist (The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby are both written from a very convincing female perspective, says this man).

Read them.

Go and read them.

Seriously. Order one now. Start with any of the four I’ve mentioned.

(Maybe avoid the later stuff).