A good book leaves you with lots of questions. This book left me with three: 1) Why was it written? 2) Who would want to read it? And 3) Why was it included in The Library of America’s Classic Crime Novels of the 1960’s?

My best guess regarding number three is that the editors wanted to preserve it as a cultural artifact, like something an archeologist found in a dig that gives us insight into the mindset of an ancient civilization. It says, Yes, this is what they read back then, and then leaves us to puzzle over what life must have been like for them and what it might have been like to live in such a world.