The Horizontal Man was Helen Eustis''s only crime novel, and she won an Edgar Award for it, combining a wildly disparate set of elements into an enduringly fascinating work. In its way it is a classical whodunit that stands comparison with old-school practitioners such as Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers.

This mystery transpires in the rarefied precincts of the English department of a venerable college, an English department very much of the restless postwar moment, echoing with references to Freud and Kafka. Eustis finds comedy high and low in a cavalcade of characters bursting at the seams with repressed sexual longings and simmering malice.

Beyond the satire, she stirs up - with a narrative whose multiple viewpoints give the book a deliberately modernistic edge - a troubling sense of the mental chaos lurking just beneath the civilized surfaces of her academic setting.


Format Häftad Omfång 318 sidor Språk Engelska Förlag The Library of America Utgivningsdatum 2020-07-14 ISBN 9781598536317