February 26, 2018 Issue

In this week’s issue, in a piece called “Ocular Proof,” a review of A. J. Finn’s thriller The Woman in the Window, Joyce Carol Oates likens the mystery novel to a Shakespearean tragedy or sonnet. She says, “If the mystery genre does not abide much reality, it should be recalled that no Shakespearean tragedy or sonnet—no work of art in which the constraints of form are exacting—is likely to withstand the bracing winds of common sense.”

Oates has made this comparison before. In her “Earthly Delights” (The New Yorker, February 5, 2001), a review of Michael Connelly’s crime novel A Darkness More Than Night, she writes,

The most talented of crime writers, like Michael Connelly, work with genre formula as poets work with “fixed” yet malleable forms like sonnets and sestinas; they affix their signatures to the archetype. It’s an art of scrupulous realism conjoined with the abiding fantasy of a resolution in which the terrifying mysteries of mankind’s inhumanity to man, suffering, dying, death are explained and dispelled.

It’s an interesting analogy. I don’t have much basis for questioning it. The only crime novels I’ve read are George V. Higgins’ three early works, The Friends of Eddy Coyle (1970), The Diggers Game (1973), and Cogan’s Trade (1974) – all superb. They aren’t formulaic. And there’s no “abiding fantasy of a resolution” in them. They’re among the grittiest, most realistic novels I’ve ever read. I’m not sure Oates’ “sonnets and sestinas” comparison applies to them.