The Praying Mantises

Paul Canova, a middle-aged university history professor, is married to Vera, a beautiful Russian émigré much younger than him. Paul's first wife and their young son have died under odd circumstances, and an insurance company launches a secret investigation about Vera's possible role in those deaths. Nevertheless, Canova seems content with his second marriage and has taken out a large life insurance policy designating Vera as beneficiary.

Then Vera accuses Canova's long-time secretary of theft, and insists that Paul fires her. The secretary maintains her innocence and later commits suicide. Paul now needs a secretary, and his teaching assistant, Christian Magny, recommends one of his own students, Beatrice Manceau. While on the job, Beatrice has a brief affair with Canova. But she soon ends it, because Christian proposes to her and she accepts.

Now married to Christian, Beatrice begins suspecting that he is secretly meeting with someone in their apartment while she is working with the professor. She hires private detectives who install a covert listening device that records all the conversations in the apartment when she is away. She finds out from the recorded tapes that Vera and Christian aren't just lovers but they are also plotting to murder Canova for his life insurance. According to their plan, Beatrice would also have to die to make it look more convincing. Beatrice then places the incriminating tape in a safe deposit box and intends to use it as the leverage against the plotters. She allows the murderers to proceed almost as planned, only to lure them in a clever trap and exact her cruel revenge.

The novel has been translated into English twice: once by Richard Howard as The Praying Mantises for Simon & Schuster (New York, 1962, republished by Signet in 1963), and also by Tony White as Praying Mantis for Hamish Hamilton (London, 1962).

The novel was the winner of the 1960 Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France and received Simon & Schuster's Inner Sanctum Mystery Award for 1962.[1]

Anthony Boucher writing for The New York Times Book Review called it "a lethally potent cocktail", "brilliant novel of murder, skillfully and economically conducted in the documentary method."[2] Robert Kirsch wrote in The Los Angeles Times: "its emphasis is never on the violence… but rather on the terror of moral bankruptcy, the cruelty of the living, one to another."[3] Sybille Bedford called it "a cool, swift, elegant, ruthless tale" and "the most originally handled modern detective story I have read".[4] Phyllis McGinley said it was "a brilliant job...superbly plotted, leanly told, and as dry and cold as well-made martini."[4] In The Spectator, Esther Howard deemed it "clever but distastefully vicious."[5]

1982: Praying Mantis, British TV film directed by Jack Gold, with Cherie Lunghi, Jonathan Pryce, Carmen Du Sautoy and Pinkas Braun.