provided a portrait of life in New York City versus life in the Connecticut countryside. A third full-fledged experimental novel, The Bitter Season, appeared in 1946 with Harcourt, Brace and was written against the background of World War II and Coates’s own divorce from Elsa Kirpal. All three novels share a passionate interest in conveying the mood and atmosphere of New York City as experienced by individual onlookers-participants at a certain moment in history through experiments in literary form. They reveal the writer as an idiosyncratic experimentalist who embraced literary innovation and placed great value on “art” but did not withdraw into solipsism. Like the work of William Carlos Williams, Coates’s fiction thrives on contact, both with the locality that inspired it, and with the reader. His first three novels are alike in that they seek to summon aesthetically a particular cultural or historical moment as witnessed and experienced by an individual who is both unique and representative, both a keen reporter and a harried participant. After the writing of The Bitter Season, Coates changed literary course and turned away from literary experimentalism to embrace crime writing. Coates’s interest in violence—a preoccupation that he shared with such contemporaries writers as Thurber, Dos Passos, Wolfe, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Hammett and West—had been evident throughout his career. Before Wisteria Cottage, Coates had paid ample attention to beatings, rape, murder, car accidents, embezzlement, and suicide. Of these and other manifestations of violence, murder fascinated him the most. Murder crops up in all his earlier works—starting with the insane homicides of the infernal x-ray machine in The Eater of Darkness, on to the wild and gruesome murders of the American outlaws of the early nineteenth century, to speculation about the potential murder of Henderson in Yesterday’s Burdens, and to the impersonal violence of war and the personal threat posed by the Mexican in The Bitter Season. Coates had also featured murder in several of his short stories. In Wisteria Cottage and The Farther Shore, however, the topic of murder was approached from a fresh angle. In all of Coates’s previous accounts of murder (except for the short story “The Net,” which is clearly a study for Wisteria Cottage), men had been the victims, not women. Also, again with the exception of “The Net,” Coates had not yet shown a murderer’s mind from within. During the last years of his career Coates wrote a