The New York Trilogy
Daniel Quinn, Blue, Nameless
(Fanshawe's Friend)
Created by Paul Auster (also writes as Paul Benjamin)
Author Paul Auster takes the conventions and cliches of the genre, and converts them, distorts them, and turns them inside out in this high-falutin', sometimes exasperating literary trilogy that's also a heap of fun.
The Edgar-nominated City of Glass is a literary novel about a P.I. writer who masquerades as a P.I. whereas Ghosts is a parable that is much more than a genre P. I. novel, and The Locked Room is something else again.
The hero of first novel, DANIEL QUINN, is a private
eye writer whose fiction becomes reality when his life is turned
upside down when he answers a mysterious telephone call for help.
The Washington Post dubbed him a "post-existentialist private
eye." Once a promising "real" writer
and poet, since the tragic death of his wife and son, all he's
written are mysteries, under the pen name of William Wilson, and
featuring P.I. Max Work. And just to further blur the lines, the
calls Quinn starts receiving are from someone looking for a P.I.
named Paul Auster. What else can a poor writer do but pose as
a P.I. to get to the bottom of it all. By the way, before he became
so gosh-darn literary, Aster wrote Squeeze Play, a very
good "straight" P.I. novel under the pseudonym of Paul
Benjamin, featuring Max Klein.
Ghosts is about a would-be eye named BLUE, a student of Brown, who is hired by White to spy on Black who lives on Orange Street and is spying on someone else.
The Locked Room is the story of the unnamed narrator who we only know as FANSHAWE'S FRIEND. When Fanshawe, a famous author, vanishes, leaving behind a wife, a son, and a horde of novels, plays and poems, his friend slowly takes over Fanshawe's life, publishing his work, marrying his wife, adopting his son, even as he becomes obsessed with his investigation into his friend's disappearance.
Questions of identity are raised, dropped, and rendered moot as the plots twist, turn, and fall back on themselves "like literary Mobius strips--by turns curious and surprising and always fascinating." (Fredic Scott, San Francisco Examiner). These books have more layers than a truck full of onions, but, like noted literary critic Eddie Cochran once said, "when it all comes true, man, that's something else!"
NOVELS
GRAPHIC NOVEL