Malice Aforethought, the first of three books written by Francis Iles, was published in 1931. It was actually the 9 or 10th novel published by author Anthony Berkeley Cox, praised for his detective Roger Sheringham who first appeared in the 1925 novel The Layton Court Mystery. 

As a fan of Berkeley Cox, and his cutting humor and twisty mind, I have had this book sat on my bookshelf for a while, waiting for me to get around to reading it. The delay was partly down to the fact that I could only get this in paperback format, and not in audio book nor kindle, which are my preferred ‘reading’ methods. There is something in Berkeley Cox’s writing that reminds me of Oscar Wilde – the same quick wit, but also a sense of apartness, standing slightly back from mankind’s and observing them with humour and irony. This is probably clearer in BC’s Sheringham novels, where (rightly or wrongly) you can see Sheringham as a mouthpiece for BC.

Not so much in Malice Aforethought, here BC challenges the conventions of crime writing in the 1930s not through the fallibility and sardonicism of his detective, but through the complete lack of a core detective and indeed, at first look, a lack of mystery too. The difference in tone between the books can perhaps answer why BC chose to publish them under a different pen name. With a distinct and recognisable style as Anthony Berkeley, published under the same name readers would come to the novel expecting similar. As Francis Iles, BC gave himself, and the reader, a fresh start, free of expectations and presumptions. 

Malice Aforethought notoriously starts with the line “it was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter.” The murderer is known to the reader far before we even have a body. Indeed, as hinted at in the opening line, Dr Bickleigh may be a murderer but he is far from decisive or fast acting and it isn’t until the end of part one, half way through the novel that he actually produces a corpse for the reader. The focus of the novel is the psychological journey that Dr Bickleigh goes through – from hating his wife and wishing for his freedom, to coming up with a plan, to enacting a plan and then the consequences.The who and how of more ‘typical’ murder mysteries is swapped for the question of ‘why’, and BC tests if he can keep the reader’s interest in a thoroughly unsympathetic main character set out to kill his wife. 

Martin Edwards cites the cases of Herbert Armstrong and William Palmer as influential on BC’s Francis Iles’s novels, and the case of Dr Crippen again shows similarities – Armstrong, a solicitor, and Crippen, a doctor, both drugged and murdered their wives and had high profile trials in 1922 and 1910 respectfully. Crippen and Palmer were both doctors so, like Dr Bickleigh, broke their oath of doing no harm and abused the trust their victim and every patient like them placed in them. Malice Aforethought goes on to influence a wave of crime fiction in its wake. Richard Hull, author of Murder of my Aunt, cites the novel as influential on his own writing, which readers can see in his own use of unsympathetic characters and subverting the traditional murder mystery format. In more recent years, the best selling How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie offers similarities in the narrative, the characters and the twist ending.