The Body of/as Evidence: Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, and the Feminist Literary Mystery

IN HIS REVIEW of Margaret Atwood’sThe Blind Assassin,Thomas Mallon ofThe New York Timescomplains that [t]he answer to the book’s chief matter of suspense—the source of the Zycron stories—answers itself so obviously and early that Iris [the framing narrator], while disclosing the truth in the book’s last pages, feels obliged to concede to the reader, “you must have known that for some time” (BA 643). (7) Mallons criticism misinterprets Atwood’s book in several significant ways. The first is that whileThe Blind Assassinrepeatedly evokes conventions of the mystery novel, it is not a conventional