So I’ve read my second Anthony Berkeley book (this time under his pen-name) and wow, he is proving to be one of the most innovative Golden Age Mystery writers that I’ve read! Trial and Error was about a man trying to prove himself guilty, and Before the Fact is a thriller from the perspective of the wife of a killer. I will be spoiling the ending for this book so please click away now if you don’t want to read any spoilers.

“Some women give birth to murderers, some go to bed with them, and some marry them.”

Opening lines of Before the Fact

Before the Fact started with a great opening line that caught my attention. At first, I thought that the book would mix in some humour (like Trial and Error), but that was confined mostly to the courtship of Lina and Johnnie. After the two get married, the book just keeps dialling up the tension, until finally, Johnnie kills Lina/Lina lets herself be murdered by Johnnie.

“The Cotherstone girls were always getting up picnics and asking participants to bring friends: a fatal thing to do, for the friends of our friends are often so unexpected.”

from Chapter one of Before the Fact

The story is told entirely from Lina’s point of view, and Iles does a masterful job of gradually reducing doubt and increasing dread. For the first part of the book, it was clear that Johnnie was a bad person, but it wasn’t so clear that he was a murderer. And that’s pretty much how Lina, who is the sole POV character in this book, wants to see Johnnie – she adores him and she wants to think that he adores her and is the perfect man. In fact, for the first half of the book, you could read it as Lina being paranoid about Johnnie and jumping to conclusions that he’s a murderer because she can only see him either as perfect or totally depraved. But then, Iles introduces certain pieces of evidence that convinced me that Lina was right and Johnnie was a murderer.

“It did seem a pity that she had to die, when she would have liked so much to live.”

Closing lines of Before the Fact

While Johnnie was interesting in the way a remorseless killer is interesting, for me the most fascinating character was Lina. Despite the fact that when she was eighteen, she had “joined the feminist movement” and that it’s in her character to take a rather “school-mistress” attitude towards Johnnie and his inability to manage money, she’s an absolute doormat. She actually goes beyond mere passivity because not only does she never voice out what Johnnie does, when she suspects that Johnnie plans to kill her for the insurance money, she writes a suicide letter so that Johnny won’t have any suspicion fall upon him. She basically considers herself an accessory before the fact (where the book gets its title from) and seems to have lost all self-preservation skills.

But despite the fact that Lina is infuriatingly wilfully ignorant about her husband, I couldn’t help but have a deep sense of pity for her. I think that Lina’s attitude is very much shaped by the attitude of the people around her – from young, she has been told that she is the intelligent one, and not the pretty one (that’s her sister), and has pretty much bought into her mother’s line of thinking that “a girl’s assets were reckoned entirely in terms of husband-catching.” Despite her intelligence, Lina has never found fulfilment in it – in fact, it’s been the reverse. Couple that with her “need of someone on a pedestal in front of her, to which she could look up as infallible” and she is basically putty in Johnnie’s hands once he has won her over, even after she discovers that he killed her father. There is only one time where she tries to leave, after Johnnie’s multiple affairs are revealed, but even then, her affair with her new lover seems half-hearted and she ends up in Johnnie’s arms again.

Reading this was a trip! I was expecting something a little more conventional (even though I knew that Trial and Error was not the normal golden age mystery) but I was blown away by this book and pretty much finished it in one evening. Although there are murders, this is not really a mystery. I think it’s more of a psychological thriller where we get a look into the mind of someone who would excuse any kind of action, even when she is the victim of murder.