Horizontal Man, The - Softcover

Eustis, Helen; Finch, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1598536311 ISBN 13: 9781598536317

Publisher: Library Of America, 2020

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Helen White Eustis (1916-2015) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and attended Smith College in Massachusetts, where she won a creative writing award. The Horizontal Man (1946), loosely based on her experiences at Smith, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel the following year. She was the author of several other works of fiction, including The Fool Killer (1954), later adapted into the film of the same name in 1965.

Charles Finch writes both crime fiction (The Laws of Murder) and literary fiction (The Last Enchantments), as well as writing about books for a variety of publications, including Slate, the Chicago Tribune, and The New York Times.

Edition details

• Publisher: Library Of America
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1598536311
• ISBN 13: 9781598536317
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 230