Literature

Scott’s Case

“Sufficiently dramatized, failure has its delights, as Fitzgerald demonstrated in those autobiographical pieces which so outraged his old friend, John Dos Passos, who wrote: ‘Christ, man, how do you find time in the middle of the general conflagration to worry about all that stuff?’”

May 1, 1980 issue

Caesar’s Things

“With Zelda it is well-known that many faults lay in herself and in her stars, but new to discover a frantic will to overcome them, a strong talent and intelligence struggling to live—and most surprising of all, incredible energy and longing for discipline.”

September 24, 1970 issue

Fitzgerald Revisited

“One pleasure of rereading Fitzgerald’s stories now is to rediscover just how good some of them in fact are, and how brilliant a handful.” 

August 15, 1991 issue

Edmund Wilson’s Letters: To and About F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I feel called upon to give you this advice because I believe you might become a very popular trashy novelist without much difficulty.”

February 17, 1977 issue

Philip Marlowe’s Revolution

“Being himself a kind of drifter, Raymond Chandler knew whereof he wrote. The mean streets down which his protagonist Philip Marlowe ventures stalwartly and alone mark the liminal frontiers between wealth and indigence, between law and some kind of order, between the city and the jungle.”

October 27, 2016 issue

Manchette: Into the Muck

Jean-Patrick Manchette wanted to demonstrate that the crime novel could be “the great moral literature of our time.”

June 18, 2014

Mystery Man

In a “clues” novel, everything depends on who is where; in a Dashiell Hammett one, it was more likely to be who was who: disguises and false names were used, dark mean streets were prowled, cars were driven at speed, people blew in from elsewhere and hid out and skipped town.

February 14, 2002 issue

The Christie Mystery

“Behind the middle-class English lady, remote and shy, whose perfectly appropriate occupation seemed to be the pouring of tea from a silver jug into thin china cups on a green lawn, was somebody else, somebody perhaps not so nice but more interesting. This other Agatha Christie knew a lot about poisons.”

December 21, 1978 issue