Amanda Cross, a skilled detective story writer, has given us a lighter side of ["Joyceana"] in her The James Joyce Murder. She has kept pace with the Joyce "industry" and has given us a series of quite plausible events leading to a murder and its curious aftermath….

Each chapter is ingeniously titled after a story from Dubliners. Amanda Cross manages this with a minimum of awkwardness. She must stretch a bit to call a Berkshire town "Araby" and to arrange for a full-scale discussion of "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" to justify the titles of two chapters. Yet she is so at home with Joyce lore and scholarship that everything proceeds with great fluency and ease.

I suspect that Amanda Cross is intimately in touch with the latest developments in fiction, especially with the post-Joycean antics of the nouveau roman. The James Joyce Murder strikes me as...