Western World, J.K. Huysmans's novel À rebours, Einstein's theory of relativity, the works of J. W. Dunne and Cartesian dualism. The critic Hugh Kenner, in a 1997 essay entitled "The Fourth Policeman", advanced a hypothesis to explain why O'Nolan had suppressed the manuscript. Noting the complex ways in which the novel draws on pagan traditions in Middle and Early Modern Irish literature, as well as the ways in which it confounds attempts to inscribe it within a realist tradition, Kenner argued that the book created a "cartoon of Ireland" that was "brilliant but disturbingly coherent." Kenner argues that the book's failure to find a publisher must have caused O'Nolan to reread it, whereupon O'Nolan (in Kenner's account) must have been so "unsettled" by the book's effect, "for he liked his effects under rational control […] and this book grimaced at him, from expressive levels he was careful never to monkey with again", that he suppressed it; not out of despair of it reaching a publisher but because it offended his own "explicitly formed and highly orthodox conscience". Kenner calls O'Nolan's Catholic conscience the "Fourth Policeman" of his essay's title. Kenner finishes the essay by predicting that while The Third Policeman may tend to be neglected in favour of O'Nolan's first novel: … it will be rediscovered, and again, and again. There's no killing a piece of mythic power like that. Allusions in other works The Third Policeman was featured in a 2005 episode of television series Lost with the intent of providing context for the show's complex mythology, with the result that sales of the book in the three weeks following its mention equalled what it had sold in the preceding six years. John Cooper Clarke's nonsense prose poem, "Ten years in an open necked shirt" contains the line "What with the drink trade on its last legs and the land running fallow for the want of artificial manures", the same line John Divney uses in the book to explain their lack of funds. Adaptations The book was adapted by the Ridiculusmus theatre company. Premiered at Aras na nGael, London in 1992 and toured in repertory until 1997. The book was adapted for an open-air theatre production by Miracle Theatre in 2017, with The Stage judging it to be an "Enjoyably absurd and inventively staged alfresco summer theatre". References Citations General and cited references Further reading External links Literary Encyclopedia: