Reading Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 as Crime Fiction

Abstract: Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49 is not commonly read as a crime narrative. However, my contention is that it bears significant traces of the genre of Sherlock Holmes, and that its oft-noted postmodern features serve to deconstruct the assumptions of traditional detective literature. Through its challenges to the notion of objective experience, its illustrations of the limits of subjectivity, and its undermining of Lyotardian metanarratives, the novel tells the story of a failing quasi-detective who learns to exist within a world that has abandoned the epistemological principles upon which the conventional detective story rests.