The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester

I read my first Alfred Bester novel in high school - The Stars My Destination (TSMD) aka Tiger Tiger.  It's a heady cocktail of revenge bildungsroman and tale of human transcendence. The dominant social change was teleportation, termed jaunting.

Last night I finished 'The Demolished Man' - the story of Ben Reich, a magnate locked in a war of commerce with old Craye D'Courtney. The dominant social change is the development of telepathy, occuring frequently enough to permit a small but growing guild of telepaths enormous social influence.  One of the biggest influences is that crime, especially murder, has been effectively rendered impossible.  But Ben Reich is not a man to be put off, though he is haunted by a spectre of the Man with No Face in his dreams and he's not going to beat D'Courtney.  So he schemes to murder, and does it, and gets away with it.  But not quite - because Lincoln Powell, telepath detective, presses him, both as a criminal, and as a powerful man who knows better, and is better, than to murder and own it.

As with TSMD, the hero's journey culminates in transcendence of the human condition.  But, on balance, I think TDM is less perfect that TSMD.  Both suffer from some under-earned 'reveals' and resolutions, but TDM raises the stakes in  way that feels particularly un-earned. I have enough respect for Bester that I can still appreciate what he's saying, and I suspect he was reading a lot of philosophy at the time which may have made him underestimate the strangeness of the introduction of "world-shakers" in the final chapters.  It's fine to do this, but it would be a better book if this was paying off a thorough set up.