SOURCE: Jones, Manina. “‘So Many Varieties of Murder’: Detection and Biography in Coming through Slaughter.” Essays in Canadian Writing, no. 53 (summer 1994): 11-26.

In the following essay, Jones traces the diverse ways the conventions of detective fiction and biography converge in Coming through Slaughter, demonstrating the appropriation of both genres by Ondaatje's postmodern narrative strategies.

[W]hat the structural and philosophical presuppositions of myth and depth psychology were to modernism … the detective story is to postmodernism. …

—Michael Holquist (150)

Among the silenced heroes celebrated and mourned in Michael Ondaatje's poem “White Dwarfs” is the writer Dashiell Hammett: “And Dashiell Hammett in success / suffered conversation and moved / to the perfect white between the words” (71). According to the prevailing myth, after winning early fame as a novelist, short-story writer, and originator of the character Sam Spade, Hammett fell “creatively silent” for nearly thirty years at the end of his life (Nolan 258). A...