Russell H. Greenan - Work - Critical Reception - Literary Style

Literary Style

I get the feeling that through some oversight or taxonomical confusion (Mr. Greenan's books are difficult to classify, therefore hard to explain) not enough readers are aware of what delightful fun he is poking at the notion that human beings are superior to skunk cabbages.

Greenan's work explored the parameters of crime fiction and was often described as macabre. While for a time he was a member of Mystery Writers of America, his stories did not fall regularly into the genre of mystery fiction. On occasion the novels were actively marketed as horror fiction, for example when Nightmare was subtitled A Contemporary Tale of Horror and Queen of America was introduced as “Meet Miss Psycho. She's the shock experience of your life.” on the cover a US paperback. But while all of Greenan's work depict murderous acts, the publishers' use of the label horror contradicted reviewers’ characterization of the author's oeuvre as charming gothic fiction However these works were also consistently praised as black comedy.

A recurring theme raised by reviewers is the difficulty of categorizing this author's work. In his study titled The Birth of Death and Other Comedies: The novels of Russell H. Greenan, the writer Tom Whalen draws widely on American literary tradition as he finds a niche for Greenan's output.

“Crime fiction then? In that crimes occur, especially murders, though his novels shed this genre's conventions faster than the best of them, Hammett, say, or Cain, Goodis, Bardin, Thompson, Highsmith, or Himes.”

“He descends from the romance tradition of Hawthorne and Poe, where allegory and dream mingle with and illuminate realism.”

Notwithstanding the prevalence of “The doppelganger, the trickster, the psychotic and the jokester” who populate these works, Whalen's search for underlying themes draws out consistent Catholic references to demonstrate how Greenan's writing can be usefully considered as theological fiction.

In the house of fiction, theological narratives reside in a special room (upstairs, back) decorated in Gothic realism where metafiction may sleep with fantasy, because God, as Ludwig Feuerbach proposed in Das Wesen des Christentums (1841), is always and only a concept, though regrettably turned by most humans into hard logic-defying fact. From these premises theological fictions rise. At this level of abstraction, one that posits a participative Deity, fantasy often partakes of madness. Either it's me that's mad, Greenan's characters say, or it's the world.

The papers of Russell H. Greenan including manuscripts and correspondence are in the John Hay Library at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island and in the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center in Boston University.