The title is a reference to a 'locked room mystery', a popular form of early detective fiction. Fanshawe, his childhood friend, has produced creative work, and when he disappears the writer publishes his work and replaces him in his family. The Locked Room is the story of a writer who lacks the creativity to produce fiction. Originally published sequentially as City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), it has since been collected into a single volume. The New York Trilogy is a series of novels by Paul Auster. The Locked Room (The New York Trilogy, #3), Paul Auster Let me simply say that once I started reading The Locked Room, I couldn’t put it down.Ģ19. To tell more than these few facts would be to tell too much. Sophie contacts the narrator, who was Fanshawe’s dearest friend, to do the reading and judging. Fanshawe also leaves his beautiful wife, Sophie, and his baby boy. Fanshawe was a writer, leaving boxes of novels, journals, poetry and plays to be read and judged. In a strange, offbeat way, all the philosophic reflections and ruminations give Auster’s short novel an irresistible drive. In this way, the novel makes for easy peasy, enjoyable reading.īut underneath this hard-boiled linguistic skin, oh my goodness, we encounter the narrator, a writer by profession, navigating the choppy waters of passion and commitment, forever brooding on an entire range of topics: life and death, self and other, childhood and memory, friendship and fatherhood, love and hate, reading and writing, self-definition and self-identity. He is the place where everything begins for me, and without him I would hardly know who I am.” So begins The Locked Room, Paul Auster’s final novel in his New York Trilogy ( City of Glass is Volume 1 and Ghosts is Volume 2) wherein an unnamed first person narrator tells the tale using the simple, straightforward language of detective fiction. “It seems to me now that Fanshawe was always there.

The new york trilogy by paul auster