On his return to Boston he married Flora Bratko and opened an antique shop in Harvard Square naming it The Cat and Racquet after the story by Honoré de Balzac.The business was short-lived, but the experience provided an abundance of material for his subsequent career as a writer.
In 1966, by then aged 40, he left his job as a ball bearing sales manager and traveled with his wife and three children to return to Nice with the intention of taking a year to finish a novel.
[7] The novels are plot-driven stories where a central character is drawn inexorably into a predicament that exposes the brittleness of human equanimity and the delusion of self-determination.
The structure of a Greenan story hinges, as in ancient Greek tragedy, on a reversal of fortune as likely to be caused by a fatal mistake or 'hamartia' as by a flaw of character.
However, Greenan plays with the idea of the flawed character and is known for creating protagonists who appear to have lost a normal relationship with reality but whose motives impress the reader as being reasonable and even judicious.
Into this solidly founded realism Greenan introduces the flourishes of imagination – often assisted by puns and word play – that have prompted critics to describe the works variously as ‘macabre’, ‘exuberant’, ‘gore’, ‘endearing’ or simply ‘extravaganzas’.
The book is a richly detailed story narrated by a singularly brilliant artist with a passion for Old Master techniques who develops an obsession to seek divine justice through an encounter with God.
The Modern Library- 20th Century Rediscoveries[10] edition published by Random House in 2003 includes an introduction by Jonathan Lethem and an afterword by the author reflecting on the novel's origins in his own childhood and the reasons for its continued appeal decades after the first printing.
[13] I get the feeling that through some oversight or taxonomical confusion (Mr. Greenan's books are difficult to classify, therefore hard to explain) not enough readers are aware of what delightful fun he is poking at the notion that human beings are superior to skunk cabbages.
In that crimes occur, especially murders, though his novels shed this genre's conventions faster than the best of them, Hammett, say, or Cain, Goodis, Bardin, Thompson, Highsmith, or Himes.”[17] “He descends from the romance tradition of Hawthorne and Poe, where allegory and dream mingle with and illuminate realism.”[18] Notwithstanding the prevalence of “The doppelgänger, the trickster, the psychotic and the jokester” who populate these works, Whalen's search for underlying themes draws out consistent Catholic references to demonstrate how Greenan's writing can be usefully considered as theological fiction.
In the house of fiction, theological narratives reside in a special room (upstairs, back) decorated in Gothic realism where metafiction may sleep with fantasy, because God, as Ludwig Feuerbach proposed in Das Wesen des Christentums (1841), is always and only a concept, though regrettably turned by most humans into hard logic-defying fact.
The work has been translated by Marie-Françoise Husson, Jean-Paul Gratias, Roger Guerbet, Simone Hilling, Nathalie Godard, Aurélie Tronchet and others.
[20] Greenan's continued popularity in France is notable and he has remarked that, "The French, though they are open to a very broad range of writing, have a particular passion for noir, so these dark stories appeal to them.
"[21] The author has cited his early literary influences as Honoré de Balzac's La Comédie Humaine and the work of Louis Ferdinand Céline.
These include the darkly comical visions of Stephen Hall whose covers appeared in the Bantam Books editions of The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton, It Happened in Boston?
reproduces the painting “Oedipus Rex“’’ (1922) by Max Ernst while the recent reprint by SchirmerGraf features a detail of “Sweet Bird of Youth” (2005) by the Scottish artist Jack Vettriano.