A philandering professor on the faculty of an Ivy League school is
found murdered, setting off ripple effects of anxiety, suspicion, and
panic in this Edgar Award-winning classic from 1946.
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 New England college, one 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 striking modernistic edge--a troubling sense
of the mental chaos lurking just beneath the civilized surfaces of her
academic setting.