by Ira Levin
‘Hello, Joanna,’ Ruthanne said.
Joanna stopped and looked at her with thick-lashed brown eyes. ‘Ruthanne,’ she said, and smiled. ‘Hello. How are you?’ Her bow lips were red, her complexion pale rose and perfect.
‘I’m fine,’ Ruthanne said, smiling. ‘I don’t have to ask how you are; you look marvellous.’
‘Thanks,’ Joanna said. ‘I’ve been taking better care of myself lately.’
‘It certainly shows,’ Ruthanne said.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t called you,’ Joanna said.
‘Oh that’s all right.’ Ruthanne hitched her cart over in front of Joanna’s so people could get by them.
‘I meant to,’ Joanna said, ‘but there’s been so much to do around the house. You know how it is.’
‘That’s all right,’ Ruthanne said. ‘I’ve been busy too. I’m almost done with my book. Just one more main drawing and a few small ones.’
‘Congratulations,’ Joanna said.
‘Thanks,’ Ruthanne said. ‘What have you been up to? Have you taken any interesting pictures?’
‘Oh no,’ Joanna said. ‘I don’t do much photography any more.’
‘You don’t?’ Ruthanne said.
‘No,’ Joanna said. ‘I wasn’t especially talented, and I was wasting a lot of time I really have better uses for.’
Ruthanne looked at her.
‘I’ll call you one of these days when I get caught up with things,’ Joanna said, smiling.
‘What are you doing then, besides your housework?’ Ruthanne asked her.
‘Nothing, really,’ Joanna said. ‘Housework’s enough for me. I used to feel I had to have other interests, but I’m more at ease with myself now. I’m much happier too, and so is my family. That’s what counts, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I guess so,’ Ruthanne said. She looked down at their carts, her own jumble-filled one against Joanna’s neatly filled one. She hitched hers out of Joanna’s way. ‘Maybe we can have that lunch,’ she said, looking at Joanna. ‘Now that I’m finishing the book.’
‘Maybe we can,’ Joanna said. ‘It was nice seeing you.’
‘Same here,’ Ruthanne said.
Joanna, smiling, walked away – and stopped, took a box from a shelf, looked at it, and fitted it down into her cart. She went away down the market aisle.
Ruthanne stood watching her, and turned and went on in the other direction.
She couldn’t get to work. She paced and turned in the close-walled room; looked out the window at Chickie and Sara playing with the Cohane girls; leafed through the stack of finished drawings and found them not as amusing and skillful as she’d thought they were.
When she finally got going on Penny at the wheel of the Bertha P. Moran, it was practically five o’clock.
She went down to the den.
Royal sat reading Men in Groups, his feet in blue socks on the hassock. He looked up at her. ‘Done?’ he asked. He had fixed the frame of his glasses with adhesive tape.
‘Hell, no,’ she said. ‘I just got started.’
‘How come?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Something’s been bugging me. Listen, would you do me a favour? Now that it’s moving I want to stay with it.’
‘Supper?’ he said.
She nodded. ‘Would you take them to the pizza place? Or to McDonald’s?’
He took his pipe from the table. ‘All right,’ he said.
‘I want to get it done with,’ she said. ‘Otherwise I won’t enjoy next weekend.’
He laid the open book down across his lap and took his pipe-cleaning gadget from the table.
She turned to go, and looked back at him. ‘You sure you don’t mind?’ she asked.
He twisted the gadget back and forth in the pipe bowl. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Stay with it.’ He looked up at her and smiled. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said.
About the Author
Ira Levin is the author of The Boys from Brazil, Sliver, The Stepford Wives and other bestsellers, as well as Broadway’s longest-running thriller, Deathtrap. He has won two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America and the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Horror Writers Association. The Stepford Wives has been made into a film twice, first in 1975 starring Katharine Ross and Peter Masterson, and again in 2004 starring Nicole Kidman and Matthew Broderick. Levin died in 2007, aged seventy-eight.
Chuck Palahniuk is an author best known for his novels Fight Club and Choke, both of which have been produced as films.
Also by Ira Levin
Novels
A Kiss Before Dying
Rosemary’s Baby
This Perfect Day
The Boys from Brazil
Sliver
Son of Rosemary
Plays
No Time for Sergeants
Interlock
Critic’s Choice
General Seeger
Drat! The Cat! (musical)
Dr Cook’s Garden
Veronica’s Room
Deathtrap
Break a Leg: A Comedy in Two Acts
Cantorial
Copyright
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
This edition published by Corsair, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2011
Copyright Ira Levin 1972
Introduction copyright Chuck Palahniuk, 2011
The right of Ira Levin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN : 978–1–84901–745–9
A KISS BEFORE DYING
Ira Levin
ISBN: 978-1-84901-591-2
Price: £7.99
Dorothy meets a handsome young man with an eye for her inheritance while she is in her first year of university. They are to be married and her life will be blissful; but Dorothy is pregnant and her fiancé’s plans are ruined, for Dorothy would be disinherited if her father discovered the truth.
So the young man provides his bride-to-be with some pills that will solve the problem. Soon there will be no baby – and perhaps no Dorothy either …
A Kiss before Dying, Levin’s first novel, earned him the 1954 Edgar Award for Best First Novel and is regarded as a modern classic.
‘Incomparable excitement.’ New York Times
ROSEMARY’S BABY
Ira Levin
ISBN: 978-1-84901-588-2
Price: £7.99
Rosemary Woodhouse and her struggling actor-husband Guy move into the Bramford, an old New York City apartment building with an ominous reputation and only elderly residents. Neighbours Roman and Minnie Castavet soon come nosing around to welcome them and, despite Rosemary’s reservations about their eccentricity and the weird noises she keeps hearing, her husband starts spending time with them.
Shortly after Guy lands a plum Broadway role, Rosemary becomes pregnant and the Castavets start taking a special interest in her welfare. As the sickened Rosemary becomes increasingly isolated, she begins to suspect that the Castavet’s circle is not what it seems.
‘A terrifying book: I can think of no other in which fear of an evil strikes with greater chill.’ Daily Te
legraph
THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL
Ira Levin
ISBN: 978-1-84901-590-5
Price: £7.99
In this classic thriller, Ira Levin imagines Dr Josef Mengele’s nightmarish plot to restore the Third Reich. Alive and hiding in South America, thirty years after the end of the Second World War, Mengele gathers a group of former colleagues for a sinister project – the creation of the Fourth Reich. Ageing Nazi hunter Yakov Lieberman is informed of the plot but before he hears the evidence, his source is killed …
Spanning continents and inspired by true events, what follows is one of Levin’s most masterful tales, both timeless and chillingly plausible.
‘Ira Levin’s most inventive plot since Rosemary’s Baby. Extremely clever, consisting of familiar Levin themes – biological engineering, the rebirth of the devil, human automation.’ New York Times
‘Levin is the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel.’ Stephen King
BLOOD RUSH
Helen Black
ISBN: 978-1-84901-473-1
Price: £6.99
Lilly Valentine, tough talking lawyer and single mother, never makes things easy for herself, and her latest case is about to become her biggest challenge yet.
Britain is gripped by the threat of gang violence – the media coverage of street crime is relentless, depicting a country flooded with guns and drugs. So when a member of a notorious girl gang is charged with attempted murder after a victim is left for dead, sympathy is in short supply.
Lilly Valentine takes on the case no one else wants. She soon realises that there’s far more to the attack than most people think and becomes determined to uncover the truth, whatever the cost …
AT THE CHIME OF A CITY CLOCK
D. J. Taylor
ISBN: 978-1-84901-390-1
Price: £7.99
Summer 1931 in seedy Bayswater and James Ross is on his uppers. An aspiring writer whose stories no one will buy, with a landlady harassing him for unpaid rent, he is reduced to selling carpet-cleaning lotion door-to-door. His prospects brighten when he meets the glamorous Suzi, but their relationship turns out to be a source of increasing bafflement. Who is her boss, the enigmatic Mr Rasmussen – whose face bears a startling resemblance to one of the portraits in Police News – and why is he so interested in the abandoned premises above the Cornhill jeweller’s shop?
Set against a backdrop on the financial crisis, At the Chime of a City Clock is a brilliantly evoked slice of thirties noir.
Praise for D. J. Taylor
‘A page-turner of the highest order … a genuine mystery – not a simple whodunit but a constant revelation of a complex and tight-knit plot.’ Philippa Gregory, The Times
DEVIL-DEVIL
G. W. Kent
ISBN: 978-1-84901-340-6
Price: £7.99
Move over Botswana – the Solomon Islands are the new place to be!
It’s 1960 and Sergeant Ben Kella of the Solomon Islands police force is only a few days into a routine patrol of the most beautiful yet dangerous and primitive areas of the South Pacific. Yet, already, he has been cursed by a magic man, stumbled across evidence of a cult uprising and failed to find an American anthropologist who has been scouring the mountainous jungle in search of a priceless erotic icon.
To complicate matters further, at a local mission station Kella discovers the redoubtable Sister Conchita secretly trying to bury a skeleton, before a mysterious gunman tries to kill her.
Mission-educated yet an aofia – the traditional peacemaker of the islands – Kella is forced to link up with Sister Conchita, an independent and rebellious young American nun, in order to track down the perpetrators of a series of bizarre murders …
KISS ME QUICK
Danny Miller
ISBN: 978-1-84901-516-5
Price: £6.99
Noir just got darker: A new generation. A new crime. A new detective.
1964. It’s Whitsun bank holiday in Brighton, and Mods and Rockers fight it out on the beach while a secret Corsican crime organization, in collusion with a corrupt police force, quietly sets about taking over all the lucrative businesses in town; gambling dens, nightclubs, drug deals.
Vince Treadwell, a savvy young detective, is sent down from London’s Soho to the coastal town to solve a murder and track down elusive and powerful gangster Jack Regent. But amidst the tangled web of crime and corruption, Vince falls for Jack’s beautiful girlfriend, Bobbie LaVita, and uncovers a dark truth from the past that changes everything …
LONDON CALLING
James Craig
ISBN: 978-1-84901-582-0
Price: £6.99
Can you win an election and cover up murder at the same time?
When Inspector John Carlyle discovers a body in a luxury London hotel room, he begins a journey through the murky world of the British ruling classes that leads him all the way to the top.
In the middle of a General Election, a murderer is stalking Edgar Carlton, the man poised to be the next prime minister. With power almost in his grasp, Carlton refuses to stand idly by while his birthright is threatened. In a world where right and wrong don’t exist and the pursuit of power is everything, Inspector Carlyle must track down the killer before Carlton takes the law into his own hands.
WHY DON’T YOU COME FOR ME?
Diane Janes
ISBN: 978-1-84901-596-7
Price: £7.99
Sometimes Jo can still hear her baby daughter’s cry, even though she vanished over twelve years ago …
For years after Lauren’s abduction, Jo has been haunted by photos of her baby daughter that continue to arrive by post, the words I still have her scrawled across the back. The police think they’re the work of a hoaxer, but Jo has always believed them to be genuine – she can’t let go of the feeling that Lauren is still alive.
But if these photographs really do come from the kidnapper, it means that someone has been keeping track of Jo’s movements all these years, that someone is watching her. As her life begins to unravel, Jo fears the truth about Lauren’s disappearance may lie in older events; a half-forgotten childhood, scarred by insanity and murder …
Praise for The Pull of the Moon:
‘A psychological thriller in the Barbara Vine style … a sense of impending doom permeates throughout, making this a real page turner.’ MyShelf.com