Vidal's Crime Novels

... readers, please be wary of any attempt to dismiss any period of Vidal’s novelistic activity, even that least well-known one in the early nineteen-fifties, during which Vidal produced genre fiction under a pen name [Edgar Box]. Vidal’s crime novels don’t merely share the high wit and style of his more “serious” fictions; they also drop some rare clues about the nascent thinking that went into the more oft-cited efforts. newyorker.