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The Horizontal Man: A Library of America eBook Classic
£6.90
Helen Eustis’s The Horizontal Man (1946) won an Edgar Award for best first novel and continues to fascinate as a singular mixture of detection, satire, and psychological portraiture. A poet on the faculty of an Ivy League school is found murdered, setting off ripple effects of anxiety, suspicion, and panic in the hot house atmosphere of an English department rife with talk of Freud and Kafka. This classic novel is one of eight works included in The Library of America’s two-volume edition Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s, edited by Sarah Weinman.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Library of America (1 Sept. 2015) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| File size | 688 KB |
| Text-to-Speech | Enabled |
| Screen Reader | Supported |
| Enhanced typesetting | Enabled |
| X-Ray | Not Enabled |
| Word Wise | Enabled |
| Sticky notes | On Kindle Scribe |
| Print length | 319 pages |
| Page numbers source ISBN | 1598536311 |
by Jean Neal
Arrived in good condition. I thought this was an exceptional book when it was first published and I still think so.very much enjoyed rereading it
by ceric7
“The Horizontal Man”-the title comes courtesy of WH Auden- was first published in 1946, and was the second recipient of the Mystery Writers of America award for best first novel by an American writer. This new volume comes with a Foreword by Charles Finch and some useful notes and biographical information.
It is easy to understand why it won the award. To the readers of the time, its experimental format-there are no chapters, just scenes which collide into each other-, its heavy use of psychoanalytic and psychological tropes, its apparent nods to the “liberated” woman and its “openness” on homosexuality, would have marked it out as notably different to the ordinary run of contemporary crime novels.
However, it has not stood the test of time and, in my view, could not ever find its way into any “Best of…” list. It is tedious. The perpetrator was obvious about 25% of the way through, and I waited in vain for the “twist” which would prove me wrong. The material could have stretched to a fairly taut
short story in the right hands, but here one just wished for the merciful release of the reveal.
There is no detection, just page upon page of undergraduate psychology. Nor could I detect the satire said to exist in the story. There are also attitudes and opinions which many will find objectionable and distasteful. It is, however, of great interest and significance in the history of mystery writing and for that reason should be on the aficionado’s list as a must read.
Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for the digital review copy
by Officer Dibble
A murder whodunnit? set in the campus of a New England university. Kevin Boyle is the passionate English lecturer full of ‘Hibernian charm’ who gets his head smashed in with a poker after only a couple of pages.
The author provides us with a steady stream of suspects before the real detection is undertaken by a local hack journalist and his new campus girlfriend Kate Innes. Kate is quite a spunky gal ‘as hard-boiled as a City editor’. She phlegmatically accepts her beau describing her as ‘chubby’ and his disdain of her grubby dungarees.
The cast list are a wacky bunch ranging from a ‘colourless’ junior, a lecturer with ‘broad possessive buttocks’ and a devoted acolyte who ‘would black the boots’ of the victim.
This would be a very mundane offering if it were not for the ‘twist’ at the end. The twist is good and the book is reasonably short; a fair trade-off.