Critics and scholars have identified Hawksmoor as a postmodern novel.[35] Ackroyd uses typical postmodern techniques, such as playfulness, intertextuality, pastiche, metafiction and temporal distortion.
Peter Ackroyd himself does not see Hawksmoor as an expressly postmodern novel but prefers the term "transitional writing":
I have never used the terms modernism or postmodernism because they mean very little to me as such, but in terms of historical consciousness history seems to be growing all the time. I don’t want to speak personally, but when I wrote a book called Hawksmoor, in 1986, it was considered rather a joke to write a novel set both in the past and in the present. It was considered a conceit. But over the last twenty years there have been any number of historical fictions with one foot in the past and one foot in the present. It’s become actually a genre of its own, and there are some novelists who are specialized in it completely. And in fact that transitional writing, if I can put it that way, between past and present, has also slipped into non-fiction, and some historical narratives and biographical narratives now make use of this device, confronting or transposing past and present."[36]
Ackroyd plays with the genre of the detective story by using the form of the detective novel but changing the premises in such a way that the typical course of events (crime–logical investigation–solution) is impossible. "Suffice it to say that in a detective story whose strange outcome is reincarnation, fiction and history fuse so thoroughly that an abolition of time, space, and person is, one might say, inflicted on the reader."[7] Thus Hawksmoor can be called an anti-detective novel:
His novels are in the first place a sort of hybrid genre, using the detective convention to a large extent, but then turning even the most obviously detective of his fictions, Hawksmoor, into an antidetective novel. Ackroyd borrows just the basic convention of the genre, mainly the investigation of details, and gradually subverts this very convention in order to construct a postmodern universe of confusion, indeterminacy and ambiguity but which can accommodate the more challenging investigation into the nature of truth or human identity."[37]
