In a profoundly outré but very suggestive 1935 essay on mimesis and entomology, Roger Caillois coined the term “teleplasty” to suggest the way bodily forms might migrate across space. Indiana invoked this same notion several decades later in one of his Village Voice columns, concluding that “some mimetic creatures fool their own kind well enough to eat each other.” His three crime novels are an exhaustive consideration of such creatures, and they show the monstrous side of the American ideal of the self-made man: what we might call the self-making man, stripped of any abiding attributes, shedding his skin at will to suit his surroundings. The traits he appropriates are pulled prêt-à-porter from the utopian pornography of mass media, with its perfunctory and hence readily imitable models of success, sophistication, intelligence. He is a response to a peculiar condition of our era: the hardly realizable sense of possibility that capitalism gives rise to as it multiplies the quantity and luxuriousness of its temptations. All the things one might own, all the fun one might have, are a spur and an affront to the pure egotistical potency that is the only thing left when generosity and compassion are either absent or burned away, as they easily may be in a culture where “winning” is the ne plus ultra.