First Lie Wins

First Lie Wins is part of the crime thriller genre. Crime thrillers have propulsive action plots that use literary devices such as unreliable narrators, red herrings, and cat-and-mouse power reversals to create mystery and suspense. The narrative arc relies on the resolution of the mysteries that drive the plot. This resolution often returns the protagonist to social status quo that existed before the narrative-driving crimes were committed. First Lie Wins engages some of these tropes. Elston uses the technique of cutting between different times in Evie’s life to create suspense and tension. While Evie is not an unreliable narrator, her first-person narration doesn’t reveal everything she knows at any given time. Elston uses this technique to characterize Evie’s evasiveness and to ensure that the story’s plot twists are as surprising as possible.

Crime thrillers typically feature a power struggle between the protagonist and a villain. In many crime thrillers, such as detective stories, the protagonist’s and antagonist’s relationship is defined by their moral relationship to the law. First Lie Wins, as a con artist thriller, belongs to a sub-genre that complicates—and often reverses––this morally oppositional relationship. As in this novel, the protagonist themselves is a criminal anti-hero. When Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt) wrote her 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, she heavily defined the 20th-century con artist thriller. The Talented Mr. Ripley is one of the first novels to feature an anti-hero protagonist who is also the novel’s criminal, collapsing the strict hero/villain binary followed by conventional crime thrillers. This moral ambiguity has come to characterize the con artist subgenre and asks the reader to reflect on their own constructions of morality. It also relies on a reversal of traditional literary power structures, as the con artist is a transgressive outsider whom the reader is asked to root for against the establishment. Con artist thrillers have seen a resurgence in the 21st century, with Gillian Flynn’s 2012 Gone Girl leading a wave of female-focused con artist thrillers that develop the theme of transgression and power-reversal to explore sex and gender expectations in modern society.

First Lie Wins engages in this tradition, with Evie acting as both hero and criminal in the narrative. As part of the theme of Duty and Decency, Evie inhabits increasingly morally gray areas, posing questions to the reader about the moral implications of social and political power. Like the female protagonists of modern con artist thrillers like Gone Girl and Inventing Anna (2019), Evie is unafraid of capitalizing on her status as a conventionally attractive white woman in order to achieve her goals. Sex is social currency in First Lie Wins and Evie often uses her body to manipulate men’s perceptions of her and to distract them. By featuring a self-assured female grifter who is aware of her physical power and is ready to weaponize it, First Lie Wins uses the mechanics of the con artist thriller to explore societal issues relevant to modern womanhood.