Joe Orton: A Casebook. Edited by Francesca Coppa. London: Routledge, 2003; pp. 181. $85 cloth.

Is it perverse to take an interest in the infamous death of a writer? How many years should pass until we can discuss the details of a tragic death in an objective context? In the case of the promising playwright Sarah Kane, it is still too soon. With Joe Orton, however, it is easy to mistake the man for the literary construction that now personifies him. In different ways, both of these writers suffer the plight of being forever fused with their texts in postmortem criticisms of their writing. In the case of Orton, however, because of the genre of his writing, we seem to be able to laugh about it.