The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

In the very opening sentence of The Third Policeman, we learn that the narrator has murdered old man Mathers by means of a jaw-crunching blow with a spade. As with other postmodern mysteries—such as Paul Auster’s Leviathan Thomas Bernhard's The Lime Works, and Martin Amis’s London Fields—the reader who hopes to "solve" the crime before the police or det…