An American Senator preparing to run for President hires Peter Cutler Sargeant II as his publicist. During the night after Sargeant arrives in Washington, the Senator is killed. But is the obvious suspect a bit too obvious?

Good twisty fun. Fascinating as much for the picture of 1950s Washington as anything else. ( )

Gore Vidal's mysteries are really satirical comedies poking fun at a society that dared to black list him. Short on mystery, but fun. ( )

This was fun because of the lovely anachronisms and the same as usual dastardly politicians getting skewered. ( )

The second of three mysteries that Gore Vidal wrote under the nom de plume of "Edgar Box" in the early 1950s, after The New York Times's savage review of his novel of curdled homosexuality The City and the Pillar (1948) -- and their subsequent banning of his works from their book review pages -- made a career as a novelist in the U.S. impossible and forced him to work for the movie and television studios for a decade, Death Before Bedtime is a locked room mystery with traces of the penchant for political and social satire that Vidal would later develop to better effect in his Narratives of Empire series (which includes Burr, Lincoln, Empire, and The Golden Age). The protagonist is a fair-haired PR man named Peter Cutler Sargeant II, who is something of a Mary Sue figure (Sargeant gives his residence as 120 Christopher Street in NYC, which is -- or was -- a gay neighborhood); Sargeant is hired by a ruthless senator with fascist ties and presidential ambitions who is blown up in his study the very same night that Sargeant and a small cast of suspects arrive at the senator's house to plan his run for the White House. Despite a promising start, what follows can only be described as "Vidal lite," as the worlds of far right political action groups, the political and social whirl of the Beltway, and the media conjugate in various unseemly pairings, with Sargeant and the Washington, D.C. police serving as more or less interested interlocutors who try to get to the bottom of things, if doing so doesn't take up too much effort, personal prestige, or time. Probably of interest only to fans of Vidal's acidulous prose who are curious to see his development as a writer. ( )

http://bactra.org/reviews/edgar-box/ ( )