SOURCE: "Inside the Locked Room," in New York Review of Books, February 5, 1998, pp. 19-21.

In the following review, Oates traces several of James's novels and praises her A Certain Justice.

So it is here at last, the distinguished thing!

—Henry James, on his deathbed

Henry James's famous final words might be the epigraph for the literary genre we call mystery/detective. In these usually tightly plotted, formulaic novels a corpse is often discovered as soon as the reader opens the book:

The corpse without hands lay in the bottom of a small sailing dinghy drifting just within sight of the Suffolk coast. It was the body of a middle-aged man, a dapper little cadaver, its shroud a dark pin-striped suit which fitted the narrow body as elegantly in death as it had in life…. He had dressed with careful orthodoxy for the town, this hapless voyager; not for...