Instead, he is an exuberant teenager whose duties as a self-described “associate gang member” (namely getting coffee and cigarettes) make him more analogous to a modern intern than a cynical criminal.Įven The Waterworks, which uses the format of the mystery genre more faithfully than Doctorow’s other works, is narrated from the perspective of the editor of a newspaper rather than that of the hyper-competent policeman who helps him solve the case. Billy Bathgate is about gangsters, including the real-life Dutch Schultz, but its titular protagonist is not a hardened killer. student who spends most of the novel writing his dissertation in Columbia University’s library. The protagonist of The Book of Daniel, which is about the investigation of a political mystery, is a twenty-five-year-old Ph.D. One way Doctorow reshaped the crime novel in his more introspective image is through his use of protagonists who are fresh-faced outsiders to the criminal underworld.
But Doctorow never let his genre’s insistence that he depict the exploits of private eyes distract him from portraying the inner workings of his main characters private Is. Doctorow’s crime fiction did this while delivering the expected thrills of the genre as well as those which come from Doctorow’s beautiful use of language. Doctorow portrayed how the minds of human beings’ function in highly individualistic ways, solve problems, and confront the specter that is the end of consciousness, which at least some of his characters tried to cheat. One that was just as devoted to the internal problems in its protagonists’ minds as it was to the external problems common to the crime genre which they tried to solve. Over the course of his over-half-a-century long career as a writer, Doctorow would reshape the crime novel into a form that depicted the wonders and horrors of human consciousness. He filled his books with all sorts of scoundrels and depicted miscarriages of justice, the machinations and murders of gangsters, as well as a memorable investigation into a missing person.ĭoctorow was adept at providing the pleasures of crime fiction, but he also sought to build upon its rock-solid foundations. Doctorow is justly acclaimed for his historical fiction, but not for how often said forays into historical fiction turned out to be crime stories. But even adored novelists can have underappreciated strains in their legacies.
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