The Third Policeman - Flann O'Brien 1967 - Walker and Company, New York - First American Edition The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped." With the help of his newly found soul named "Joe, " he grapples with the riddles and contradictions that three eccentric policeman present to him.

The last of O’Brien’s novels to be published,
The Third Policeman joins O’Brien’s other fiction (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Best of Myles, and The Dalkey Archive) to ensure his place, along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of Ireland’s great comic geniuses.’ [blurb from later publisher]
  "By no means recently published, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman will, nevertheless, be perpetually new. The literary equivalent of a Tesla invention, The Third Policeman is an astonishingly great book that is so intricate, so improbably effective, that one cannot tell, merely by looking, what makes it tick. The story is a strange dream-journey that at times is so substantial that the reader will find himself double-checking the thickness of the book itself, amazed that the whole thing fits in so slim a volume.... [The Third Policeman] "must not be allowed to be forgotten. More images are painted in its 200 pages than in the massive Pulitzer contenders of today, more fantasy and dream than in a million pages of Tolkien or Rowling. Reading this book will actually improve your imagination, your speech, your intelligence..." (Bookslut)

“If we don’t cherish the work of Flann O’Brien we are stupid fools who don’t deserve to have great men. Flann O'Brien is a very great man.” (Anthony Burgess, author of
A Clockwork Orange)

"This is truly a remarkable piece of work that has been likened to
Alice in Wonderland but to my mind has more in common with the works of such eccentric European writers as Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, Bruno Schulz, Witold Gombrowicz and Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. . . . Who knows what he might have achieved had The Third Policeman seen the light of day in his own lifetime? The brilliance of Flann O’Brien lies not just in the wild invention he displays but the lengths he is prepared to go to." (Joe Sommerlan, The Statesman).

Thin octavo (book size 22.5x13.9cm), pp. 200. In publisher’s grey-brown cloth, spine lettered in gilt. Dust jacket price-clipped to lower corner of front flap.
  Condition: Fine but for some light foxing to top edge, in fine price-clipped dust jacket.   Ref: 111459   Price: HK$ 2,200