the book using exactly the same words to describe the barracks and the narrator's opinion of it that were used earlier, the story having circled around itself and restarted. This time, John Divney joins the narrator on the road; they neither look at nor speak to each other. They both enter the police station and are confronted by Sergeant Pluck, who repeats his earlier dialogue and ends the book with a reprise of his original greeting to the narrator: "Is it about a bicycle?" he asked. Publication history In 1940, O'Nolan completed the novel and circulated the typescript among friends in Dublin. He submitted it to Longman's, the English publisher of his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, but they declined to publish it. O'Nolan believed that Graham Greene, who had been a champion of his at Longman, was still a reader with the company, but he was not. Consequently, the novel fell on less sympathetic ears. The rejection notice read in part: We realize the author's ability but think that he should become less fantastic and in this new novel he is more so. The American author William Saroyan, who had become acquainted with O'Nolan during a brief stay in Dublin, offered the use of his literary agent in finding an American publisher, but with no success. O'Nolan made no further attempts at publication and shelved the manuscript, claiming that it had been lost. O'Nolan told his friends that while driving through Donegal the boot of his car opened unknown to him, causing the manuscript to flutter out page by page until it was gone. In reality he left it on the sideboard in his dining room, in plain view to him every day as he ate, for 26 years. He later used elements of The Third Policeman in his 1964 novel The Dalkey Archive. After O'Nolan's death in 1966, his widow Evelyn O'Nolan sent the typescript to MacGibbon & Kee, O'Nolan's publishers throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The firm published the book in 1967. Reviewer Thomas Kilroy described it as a "masterpiece". O'Nolan's opinion In a letter to William Saroyan, dated 14 February 1940, O'Nolan explained the strange plot of The Third Policeman: When you get to the end of this book you realize that my hero or main character (he's a heel and a killer) has been dead throughout the book and that all the queer ghastly things which