Death Before Bedtime

Introduction to DEATH BEFORE BEDTIME

In the early 1950s, Victor Weybright, then an editor at E. P. Dutton, suggested that Gore Vidal try writing a mystery novel under a pseudonym. Inspired by writers like Agatha Christie, whose work he knew well, Vidal took the suggestion and began writing mysteries under the name “Edgar Box.” (Edgar suggests Poe, of course, but also Edgar Wallace; Box reminds one of a coffin, although Vidal had recently met an actual family by the name of Box.) In all, he wrote three books as Box, each of them featuring the dashing public relations man and amateur sleuth, Peter Sargeant II. Death Before Bedtime was the second book starring Sargeant, who needs to use his considerable charm to hold his own against some of Washington’s toughest politicians.

Victor Weybright, now sadly departed, was delighted with my reincarnation as a writer of mystery stories, and after the commercial success of Death in the Fifth Position he insisted that I write another one as soon as possible. I asked: What about? Even a mystery writer does, after all, require a subject.

He had a wheezing chuckle, the product of too much good living, and as he wheezed, red faced, he said in the voice of a schoolteacher, “Write what you know.” So what did I know? I was the grandson of Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and I grew up in the world of politics. At one point my divorced mother remarried Hugh D. Auchincloss, a wealthy man, and we lived grandly for a time on the Potomac in a fine house called Merrywood. After a few years, my mother divorced Auchincloss, who in turn married the mother of Jacqueline Bouvier. What I knew well was the world of Washington, the world of the ruling class. This world becomes the subject, or at least the setting, for Death Before Bedtime.

It’s the story of Senator Leander Rhodes, who chairs the committee on Spoils and Patronage—a committee I invented for my own purposes. As you will see, Rhodes suffers an untimely death in his stately home. And so I call again on Peter Sargeant II, my public relations man from New York, who will set out to solve the mystery at hand.

When I think back to this novel, published in 1953, I’m reminded of a dinner party at the White House, some years later. Jack Kennedy was a serious student of mystery novels—which at times interfered with his reading of the latest James Bond epics—and I remember his telling me the plot of an Edgar Wallace novel. In the story, a British prime minister has been warned that after twenty-four hours on a certain day he would be assassinated. I know it sounds macabre, but Jack was fascinated by assassination stories; he was also very relaxed about it and his line was: there is no way you can avoid assassination if your would-be killer doesn’t mind being killed himself. This turned out to be prophetic.

I can still hear Victor wheezing in my ear, repeating advice backward schoolteachers give to young writers: Write what you know. So I wrote what I knew, delivering a story set in Washington, D.C., in the house of a senator (not JFK, who came later in my life). The senator in question is preparing to run for president if one of many enemies does not terminate him before that joyous event. For me, it was amusing to mix politics and murder, which of course have always gone together in this country, often with terrible results—as we discovered on November 22, 1963.

—Gore Vidal, 2010