His fiction is always strange and unpredictable, deftly incorporating American and European literary traditions and sensibilities. Starting out as a struggling poet over 40 years ago (he once believed everything he touched ‘turned to failure’), Auster has become one of the most prolific and critically-acclaimed American authors in the contemporary era, sitting comfortably alongside fellow literary champions Don DeLillo and Salman Rushdie.Īmerican literary critic Sven Birkerts describes Auster as ‘the ghost at the banquet of contemporary American letters’. The New York Trilogy is, in many ways, comparable to Auster’s own unusual journey as a writer. They are, however, the kind of dilemmas Paul Auster explores in his iconic The New York Trilogy – three brain-teasing novellas that remain as haunting and mesmerising as any Stieg Larsson pageturner. The criminal is always the person that the reader least suspects and the solution to the mystery leaves us with a brimming sense of satisfaction.īut what happens when the detective can’t solve the case? When even the most promising clues only lead to others? When paranoia invades the mind and turns the ill-equipped investigator into a psychotic? These aren’t the kind of questions that typically arise from the genre. Righting wrongs and catching villains, the sleuth discovers clues and questions suspects. The tough, wisecracking private detective quickly arrives on the scene, promising to do what the incompetent official authorities will not: crack the case. From Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary Sherlock Holmes to the gritty hardboiled school of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, these stories always begin with a shocking crime. Complicated cases, grisly gunplay, slippery suspects, determined detectives and bitter betrayals – these are common expectations when we read crime fiction.

The new york trilogy author