Raymond Chandler, Part 4: The Simple Art of Murder

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By 1944 Raymond Chandler had four novels behind him and a job at Paramount, and he was still regarded by most critics as a writer of thrillers. That December, The Atlantic Monthly published an essay in which he explained, with considerable relish, what was wrong with nearly every detective story ever written, and what a good one ought to be. He called it The Simple Art of Murder. He revised it two years later for an anthology, and in 1950 it gave its title to a collection of his early pulp stories. It is short, around a dozen pages. It is also the clearest statement of what Chandler thought he was doing, and one of the most quoted pieces of criticism any American crime writer has produced.

The first sentence sets the terms. "Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic." Chandler's point is that every kind of novel, even the stiff old ones, once felt true to its readers. The detective story is judged by the same standard. And by that standard, he says, most detective stories fail.

His main target is the classic English mystery of the 1920s and 1930s, the country-house puzzle with a tidy cast of suspects and a brilliant amateur sleuth. Critics of the time called it the Golden Age of detective fiction. Chandler was not impressed. He takes one admired example, The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh, which the critic Alexander Woollcott had called one of the three best mystery stories of all time. Chandler takes the plot apart like a mechanic. A wealthy man shaves his beard to impersonate his own brother, gets murdered, and is mistaken for that brother. Chandler lists seven things the police would obviously do that the book requires them not to do. They would identify the body. They would check whether the missing man was the dead man. "Nothing would be easier than to prove it," he writes. "Not even to think of it is incredible."

He goes on through other classics. A Dorothy Sayers story depends on a victim standing in exactly the right spot to be hit by a falling weight. Chandler calls that having God sit in your lap, and says a murderer who needs that much help from Providence must be in the wrong business. An Agatha Christie solution, in which everybody on a train did it together, he compares to assembling an egg-beater. His summary of the whole school is blunt: these stories "do not really come off intellectually as problems, and they do not come off artistically as fiction."

It is very funny, and it is also unfair, and Chandler knew it. He admits he likes the English style better than its American imitations. The English, he says, "may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers." And the essay has a blind spot. Chandler's own plots are hardly models of plausibility. This is the man who could not say who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep. His real complaint was about something else: honesty of texture. Real murders, he argues, are usually unplanned and stupid, and the police know that the hardest case is the one somebody "only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off." A story that ignores that cannot be about the world.

He also goes after an idea from Dorothy Sayers, that detective fiction is a literature of escape, which can never reach the highest level of art. Chandler calls this critics' jargon. "There are no dull subjects," he writes, "only dull minds." All reading for pleasure is escape, whether the subject is Greek, mathematics or astronomy. To pretend otherwise, he says, is to be an intellectual snob.

Then comes the turn. The writer who broke the pattern, Chandler says, was Dashiell Hammett, the former Pinkerton detective who wrote The Maltese Falcon. Here the essay contains its best-known sentences. "Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley." He "gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish." Hammett wrote in a version of American speech that readers took for plain talk, but Chandler insists it was a real style, as worked-over as any literary prose.

He is careful not to make the tough style sound easy. It is easy to fake, he says: "brutality is not strength, flipness is not wit." Anyone can write a character saying "Yeah."

Then Chandler describes the world he and Hammett were writing about. It is a long, angry sentence about cities where gangsters own restaurants, a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor sends a man to jail for carrying a pint, the mayor may have condoned murder for money, and a witness to a holdup slips back into the crowd rather than testify. "It is not a very fragrant world," he writes, "but it is the world you live in."

And then, finally, the paragraph that made the essay famous. "In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption." And: "down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." The detective, he says, must be "the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world." He is relatively poor, proud, lonely, and honest without making a speech about it. He talks "with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness."

That is obviously a portrait of Philip Marlowe. The essay is a manifesto, and also a job description for the hero Chandler had already invented. Its realism stops exactly where Marlowe begins. The city is corrupt, but the man walking through it is incorruptible, and Chandler does not pretend that is realistic. He calls it the quality of redemption, the thing that makes a story art instead of a report.

The 1950 collection that took the essay's title gathered the pulp stories Chandler wrote before The Big Sleep, the apprentice work where Marlowe's voice was assembled. In a separate introduction, Chandler remembered what the pulps demanded: constant action, because if you stopped to think you were lost. His advice from those years became one of the most quoted lines about genre writing: "When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand." He added that this could get to be pretty silly, but somehow it didn't seem to matter.

The two pieces together show Chandler's double attitude toward his trade. He was a snob who wrote for the pulps, and a pulp writer who could out-argue the snobs. The essay's closing phrase gave Martin Scorsese the title of his film Mean Streets, and generations of crime writers have treated it as a creed.

Next time, Book Report closes the series with the novel where Chandler tested that creed hardest, against friendship, drink and his own grief. That is The Long Goodbye.