An inverted detective story, it was first serialized in three parts, beginning with the January 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction,[1] followed by publication of the novel in 1953.

The Demolished Man is a science fiction police procedural set in a future where telepathy is common, although much of its effectiveness is derived from one individual having greater telepathic skill than another.

The presence of "peepers" has prevented the commission of murder for more than seventy years so Reich devises an elaborate plan to ensure his freedom.

Reich bribes Dr. Augustus ("Gus") Tate, a prominent peeper psychiatrist, and uses him to mentally steal information about D'Courtney's planned attendance at a party.

To further conceal his intentions from telepaths, Reich visits a songwriter, Duffy Wygand, to teach him a jingle that makes his real thoughts hard to read.

From Monarch's research facility, Reich secures a small flash grenade which can disrupt a victim's perception of time by temporarily destroying the eyes' rhodopsin.

He knows how to replace the bullet in the handgun's ammunition with a gelatin capsule filled with water in order to eliminate ballistics evidence.

Just as he is about to leave, completing his getaway, a drop of blood from D'Courtney's body in the room above lands on him, and the party ends in chaos as the police are called.

As telepathically gathered evidence is legally inadmissible in court, but can be used to guide an investigation, the detective is obliged to assemble the murder case with traditional police procedures and to establish motive, opportunity, and method.

Just as Powell believes that he has wrapped the case up entirely, the interrogation of Hassop yields disturbing results: D'Courtney had accepted the merger proposal.

He asks the help of every Esper in attempting to arrest Reich, channeling their collective mental energy through Powell in the dangerous telepathic procedure called the "Mass Cathexis Measure".

One by one, he removes elements of reality, beginning with the stars in the sky, until Reich is left believing that he is the only real being in a world constructed around him, as a game.

Once arrested and convicted, Reich is sentenced to the dreaded Demolition— the stripping away of his memories and the upper layers of his personality, emptying his mind for re-education.

[3] Boucher and McComas praised the novel as "a taut, surrealistic melodrama [and] a masterful compounding of science and detective fiction", singling out Bester's depiction of a "ruthless and money-mad [society] that is dominated and being subtly reshaped by telepaths" as particularly accomplished.

[4] Imagination reviewer Mark Reinsberg received the novel favorably, citing its "brilliant depictions of future civilization and 24th century social life".

[8] In an SF Site Featured Review, Todd Richmond wrote that the book is "a complicated game of manoeuvering, evasion, and deception, as Reich and Polwell [sic] square off against one another", adding: The game is a very interesting one, because while Reich is a very rich man and has considerable resources, Polwell [sic] has an entire network of peepers to help him gather information and obtain evidence...

"[8] In 1959, novelist Thomas Pynchon applied for a Ford Foundation Fellowship to work with an opera company, proposing to write, among other possibilities, an adaptation of The Demolished Man.

[citation needed] Since reading the novel as a young man, director Brian De Palma has considered adapting it for film.