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The Horizontal Man was Helen Eustis's only crime novel, and she won an Edgar Award for it, combining a wildly disparate set of elements into an enduringly fascinating work. In its way it is a classical whodunit that stands comparison with old-school practitioners such as Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. This mystery transpires in the rarefied precincts of the English department of a venerable college, an English department very much of the restless postwar moment, echoing with references to Freud and Kafka. Eustis finds comedy high and low in a cavalcade of characters bursting at the seams with repressed sexual longings and simmering malice. Beyond the satire, she stirs up - with a narrative whose multiple viewpoints give the book a deliberately modernistic edge - a troubling sense of the mental chaos lurking just beneath the civilized surfaces of her academic setting.… (more)
User reviews
Doesn't hold up through the years
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PLOT OR PREMISE:
A professor is killed, and a young student in love with him confesses to the murder. But there are lots of other more likely suspects.
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WHAT I LIKED:
Eustis won the 1947 Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and it is easy to see why it won.
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WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:
There are some parts that just don't hold up. The understanding of mental health disorders were not as rich, and the interactions of the two protagonists are misogynistic to read (he continually calls her fatty and comments when she drinks a beer that there too many calories). There's also an underlying current that women are nothing without a man. Hard to read in 2019, even as historical. The red herrings clear by midway through the novel, and the solution / foreshadowing is obvious, leaving the last 40% of the novel just "get to it, already".
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DISCLOSURE:
I received no compensation, not even a free copy, in exchange for this review. I am not personal friends with the author, nor do I follow her on social media.
As meanderingly interesting as it is, a modern reader will work out the culprit ahead of anyone in the story and many will find Molly an exasperating figure; I certainly did. She’s such a pathetic ninny that it’s hard to read her sections. There is hardly any police involvement although their menace looms large for Molly whose confession is patently false. It falls to the good Dr. Forstmann to make sure she isn’t arrested and to find the real killer. Not that he does anything like serious detecting, he’s more a vehicle to show us various scenes in the suspects’ lives.
No, events in the book aren’t driven by the shrink, that falls to Jack and Kate who join in an uneasy alliance to find out what’s going on with teachers Freda, George and Leonard and which of them is guilty of killing Kevin Boyle. There are shenanigans and some vaguely insulting scenes where Jack bemoans the fact that Kate doesn’t get all dolled up all the time and might need to lose a few pounds. Also that she can’t be a lesbian because she isn’t flat chested. What?
Spoilers
Molly isn’t the only extreme character, George is a histrionic mama’s boy who is nearly insulting in his portrayal of the repressed homosexual. The scenes with the two of them are incredibly nutty. His sinister notebook is an interesting idea that must have been fresh in 1946, but for a modern reader the mysterious writer won’t be;
We know a woman killed him and we know she declared her love for him just before doing the deed. What we don’t know is whether this particular student is the murderer, or if her confession is simply part of her hysteria. The story unfolds through the viewpoint of a number of characters some of whom I liked much more than others. Although I was sure that I knew who the murderer was, the author managed to completely blindside me in the last few pages.
I found The Horizontal Man a challenging read as the author didn’t break the book into chapters, instead the book ran as one narrative so I didn’t always realize when one narrator was changed to another. At times I felt the author delved too deeply into psychology but overall it is a compelling and unusual story.
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Eustis (1916-2015) attended Smith College and did graduate work at Columbia. She wrote several novels and stories in addition to "The Horizontal Man", including a Civil War novel, "The Fool Killer" which in 1965 was made into a film starring Anthony Perkins. In her latter years, Eustis translated several important books from French including "When I was Old" by Georges Simeon.