The Eighth Circle
by Stanley Ellin
Summary
Murray Kirk runs the best private inquiry agency in Manhattan, and Ellin's first move is to dismantle every expectation the phrase private detective carries: Conmy and Kirk employs researchers, not gunmen, men in good suits combing records, tailing adulterers for divorce lawyers and vetting executives, a business of files and billable hours that has made Kirk rich and left him, at thirty five, quietly unsure what he is for. Dante supplies the title: the eighth circle is the fraud circle, and the novel keeps asking who in it is not some kind of fraud.
The case is a poisoned gift. Kirk is retained in the matter of Arnold Lundeen, a police officer indicted in a corruption sweep, ostensibly to help prove him clean, and takes the job for the worst reason available: he has met Lundeen's fiancée, Ruth Vincent, and wants her, and somewhere below acknowledgment he wants the client guilty. Ellin runs the investigation as genuine procedure, wiretap transcripts, bagmen, the anatomy of fifties graft, while conducting his real business underneath: a moral study of a man using the machinery of truth finding as an instrument of desire, the detective as the eighth circle's own citizen.
Whether Lundeen is dirty stays honestly uncertain for most of the book, and the resolution costs Kirk his complacency in ways the genre rarely charged its heroes.
A little over two hundred pages, deliberate by design.
Best for readers who want the private eye novel written as serious moral fiction, the agency business demystified and the hero on the couch.
Historical Context & Significance
The Eighth Circle won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1959, adding the top prize to a career already decorated at the short length: Stanley Ellin was the acknowledged master of the American crime story, twice an Edgar winner for stories, whose debut story The Specialty of the House remains one of the most remembered in the genre's history.
The novel divided its first critics on exactly the ground it chose: Early reviewers wondered whether it was a suspense story or a serious novel, slow as the one, tidy as the other, an argument that has since resolved in the book's favour, its reputation as an early landmark of the literary private eye novel now standard.
Ellin worked famously slowly, a page a day, a novel every few years, each different in kind; the Mystery Writers of America eventually named him a Grand Master, and this book stands as his longest answer to the genre's oldest question, what the detective's clean hands actually cost.