The thing about this astonishing book that really earned Didion's admiration was the vast emptiness and melancholy of the West, the atmosphere of Utah, which Mailer captures with perfect pitch, using only simple words and phrases to reach into the void.

It was as if the many dangerous excursions Mailer had made into the heart of violence - state violence, violence as existential freedom, and his own dark capacities - had come home in the hauntingly bleak story of Gary Gilmore's crime and punishment. In some ways it is a simple tale: Gilmore, a young felon who has spent sixteen years in prison, makes his way home to the Mormon community of Provo, Utah, where he tries to readjust and soon kills two young men. I will not spoil your reading by delineating the plot much further, except to say that the crime is not the end for Gilmore, but the beginning of a long journey.

Dostoevsky is there in the moral dynamics of the tale, the wrangling with evil and reincarnation, with sin and responsibility, but Mailer brings a lifetime of conscience-flaying to the page.

Every sentence is weighed and measured against the artistic requirements of the story: that is what makes it a novel.

No other book of Mailer's was written with the same impeccable instinct for what is right, what is hidden, what is known beyond words and what can be found only by sending out one's imagination. Gary Gilmore, the double murderer, may appear to be the book's centreless centre, but it is the land itself, 'out there', that whispers through the book like a hot breeze in the desert.