Death Before Bedtime

Written by Gore Vidal and Edgar Box

Narrated by Mikael Naramore

In Death Before Bedtime, dashing P.R. man Peter Sargent is invited to the home of a venerable senator to help strategize his imminent run for president. On the night before he’s to announce, though, the senator is murdered in his bed. No longer needed as a political publicist, Sargent finds himself helping the police find the killer. He deftly navigates an eccentric cast of characters, all of whom are suspects: the rebellious daughter; the sycophantic aide; the grieving widow; and the power-hungry governor with his eye on the senator’s job. Somehow, between charming the senator’s daughter and glad-handing Washington’s elite, Sargent still manages to methodically put the pieces into place and sees that politics truly is a cut-throat business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Jan 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781799751137

Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) was born at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His first novel, Williwaw, written when he was 19 years old and serving in the army, appeared in the spring of 1946. He wrote 23 novels, five plays, many screenplays, short stories, well over 200 essays, and a memoir.

Reviews for Death Before Bedtime

[Christopher Hegan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Gore Vidal is a wonderful writer in his own vein and every bit as good asAgatha Christie, but that’s not saying much. I got bored.

[condorena · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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

[uvula_fr_b4 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

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.