Laura

⚖The case for it

A detective falls in love with a dead woman through her possessions, then she walks in the door. Not dead after all. Caspary's novel of shifting narrators and unreliable desires subverted the hard-boiled tradition: the detective consumed by obsession rather than a figure of mastery. The Otto Preminger film is a classic; the novel is more complex.

— the canon

✕The case against

Waldo Lydecker narrates the first section so well that everyone after him sounds like a court stenographer; Caspary's rotating narrators are a great idea executed at uneven strength. Mark's love for a dead woman asks more belief than the book builds, Shelby is cardboard, and the Preminger film has so absorbed the plot that the twist now arrives pre-spoiled.

— the honest librarian