The Question is the Writer Himself: Paul Auster’s Locked Room in City of Glass

Abstract

Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy — originally published as three separate novels, City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986) — are works where the ultimate nightmares for detective fiction come true. These are stories where unexplained absences and strange disappearances are the norm and where the generic conventions dissolve into an endless pursuit of an unspecified mystery. In the post-Second World War period, since the appearance of Borges’s three detective stories, two distinct forms of the ratiocinative detective story emerged. The conventional detective tale with its formulaic narrative of enclosure now found itself running parallel with a new form, the metaphysical detective story.1 Successive novels by writers such as Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet, Durrenmatt and Pynchon, amongst others, have all augmented this growing body of work.2