The Simple Art Of Murder

 Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic. Old-fashioned
novels which now seem stilted and artificial to the point of burlesque
did not appear that way to the people who first read them. Writers like
Fielding and Smollett could seem realistic in the modern sense because
they dealt largely with uninhibited characters, many of whom were about
two jumps ahead of the police, but Jane Austen’s chronicles of highly
inhibited people against a background of rural gentility seem real
enough psychologically. There is plenty of that kind of social and
emotional hypocrisy around today. Add to it a liberal dose of
intellectual pretentiousness and you get the tone of the book page in
your daily paper and the earnest and fatuous atmosphere breathed by
discussion groups in little clubs. These are the people who make best
sellers, which are promotional jobs based on a sort of indirect snob
appeal, carefully escorted by the trained seals of the critical
fraternity, and lovingly tended and watered by certain much too powerful
pressure groups whose business is selling books, although they would
like you to think they are fostering culture. Just get a little behind
in your payments and you will find out how idealistic they are.

The detective story for a variety of reasons can seldom be promoted. It
is usually about murder and hence lacks the element of uplift. Murder,
which is a frustration of the individual and hence a frustration of the
race, may have, and in fact has, a good deal of sociological
implication. But it has been going on too long for it to be news. If the
mystery novel is at all realistic (which it very seldom is) it is
written in a certain spirit of detachment; otherwise nobody but a
psychopath would want to write it or read it. The murder novel has also
a depressing way of minding its own business, solving its own problems
and answering its own questions. There is nothing left to discuss,
except whether it was well enough written to be good fiction, and the
people who make up the half-million sales wouldn’t know that anyway. The
detection of quality in writing is difficult enough even for those who
make a career of the job, without paying too much attention to the
matter of advance sales.
The detective story (perhaps I had better call it that, since the
English formula still dominates the trade) has to find its public by a
slow process of distillation. That it does do this, and holds on
thereafter with such tenacity, is a fact; the reasons for it are a study
for more patient minds than mine. Nor is it any part of my thesis to
maintain that it is a vital and significant form of art. There are no
vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious
little of that. The growth of populations has in no way increased the
amount; it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can
be produced and packaged.
Yet the detective story, even in its most conventional form, is
difficult to write well. Good specimens of the art are much rarer than
good serious novels. Second-rate items outlast most of the high-velocity
fiction, and a great many that should never have been born simply refuse
to die at all. They are as durable as the statues in public parks and
just about as dull.
This fact is annoying to people of what is called discernment. They do
not like it that penetrating and important works of fiction of a few
years back stand on their special shelf in the library marked
“Best-sellers of Yesteryear” or something, and nobody goes near them but
an occasional shortsighted customer who bends down, peers briefly and
hurries away; while at the same time old ladies jostle each other at the
mystery shelf to grab off some item of the same vintage with such a
title as The Triple Petunia Murder Case or Inspector Pinchbottle to

the Rescue. They do not like it at all that “really important books”
(and some of them are too, in a way) get the frosty mitt at the reprint
counter while Death Wears Yellow Garters is put out in editions of
fifty or one hundred thousand copies on the newsstands of the country,
and is obviously not there just to say goodbye.
To tell the truth, I do not like it very much myself. In my less stilted
moments I too write detective stories, and all this immortality makes
just a little too much competition. Even Einstein couldn’t get very far
if three hundred treatises of the higher physics were published every
year, and several thousand others in some form or other were hanging
around in excellent condition, and being read too.
Hemingway says somewhere that the good writer competes only with the
dead. The good detective story writer (there must after all be a few)
competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of
the living as well. And on almost equal terms; for it is one of the
qualities of this kind of writing that the thing that makes people read
it never goes out of style. The hero’s tie may be a little out of the
mode and the good gray inspector may arrive in a dogcart instead of a
streamlined sedan with siren screaming, but what he does when he gets
there is the same old futzing around with timetables and bits of charred
paper and who trampled the jolly old flowering arbutus under the library
window.
I have, however, a less sordid interest in the matter. It seems to me
that production of detective stories on so large a scale, and by writers
whose immediate reward is small and whose need of critical praise is
almost nil, would not be possible at all if the job took any talent. In
that sense the raised eyebrow of the critic and the shoddy merchandising
of the publisher are perfectly logical. The average detective story is
probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average
novel. It doesn’t get published. The average—or only slightly above
average—detective story does. Not only is it published but it is sold
in small quantities to rental libraries and it is read. There are even a
few optimists who buy it at the full retail price of two dollars,
because it looks so fresh and new and there is a picture of a corpse on
the cover.
And the strange thing is that this average, more than middling dull,
pooped-out piece of utterly unreal and mechanical fiction is really not
very different from what are called the masterpieces of the art. It
drags on a little more slowly, the dialogue is a shade grayer, the

cardboard out of which the characters are cut is a shade thinner, and
the cheating is a little more obvious. But it is the same kind of book.
Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad
novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective
story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and
they are about them in very much the same way. There are reasons for
this too, and reasons for the reasons; there always are.
I suppose the principal dilemma of the traditional or classic or
straight deductive or logic and deduction novel of detection is that for
any approach to perfection it demands a combination of qualities not
found in the same mind. The coolheaded constructionist does not also
come across with lively characters, sharp dialogue, a sense of pace, and
an acute use of observed detail. The grim logician has as much
atmosphere as a drawing board. The scientific sleuth has a nice new
shiny laboratory, but I’m sorry I can’t remember the face. The fellow
who can write you a vivid and colorful prose simply will not be bothered
with the coolie labor of breaking down unbreakable alibis.
The master of rare knowledge is living psychologically in the age of the
hoop skirt. If you know all you should know about ceramics and Egyptian
needlework, you don’t know anything at all about the police. If you know
that platinum won’t melt under about 3000° F. by itself, but will melt
at the glance of a pair of deep blue eyes if you put it near a bar of
lead, then you don’t know how men make love in the twentieth century.
And if you know enough about the elegant flânerie of the pre-war
French Riviera to lay your story in that locale, you don’t know that a
couple of capsules of barbital small enough to be swallowed will not
only not kill a man—they will not even put him to sleep if he fights
against them.
* * * * *
Every detective story writer makes mistakes, of course, and none will
ever know as much as he should. Conan Doyle made mistakes which
completely invalidated some of his stories, but he was a pioneer, and
Sherlock Holmes after all is mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of
unforgettable dialogue. It is the ladies and gentlemen of what Mr.
Howard Haycraft (in his book Murder for Pleasure) calls the Golden Age
of detective fiction that really get me down. This age is not remote.
For Mr. Haycraft’s purpose it starts after the First World War and lasts
up to about 1930. For all practical purposes it is still here. Two
thirds or three quarters of all the detective stories published still

adhere to the formula the giants of this era created, perfected,
polished, and sold to the world as problems in logic and deduction.
These are stern words, but be not alarmed. They are only words. Let us
glance at one of the glories of the literature, an acknowledged
masterpiece of the art of fooling the reader without cheating him. It is
called The Red House Mystery, was written by A. A. Milne, and has been
named by Alexander Woollcott (rather a fast man with a superlative) “one
of the three best mystery stories of all time.” Words of that size are
not spoken lightly. The book was published in 1922 but is timeless, and
might as easily have been published in July, 1939, or, with a few slight
changes, last week. It ran thirteen editions and seems to have been in
print, in the original format, for about sixteen years. That happens to
few books of any kind. It is an agreeable book, light, amusing in the
Punch style, written with a deceptive smoothness that is not so easy
as it looks.
It concerns Mark Ablett’s impersonation of his brother Robert as a hoax
on his friends. Mark is the owner of the Red House, a typical
laburnum-and-lodge-gate English country house. He has a secretary who
encourages him and abets him in this impersonation, and who is going to
murder him if he pulls it off. Nobody around the Red House has ever seen
Robert, fifteen years absent in Australia and known by repute as a
no-good. A letter is talked about (but never shown) announcing Robert’s
arrival, and Mark hints it will not be a pleasant occasion. One
afternoon, then, the supposed Robert arrives, identifies himself to a
couple of servants, is shown into the study. Mark goes in after him
(according to testimony at the inquest). Robert is then found dead on
the floor with a bullet hole in his face, and of course Mark has
vanished into thin air. Arrive the police, who suspect Mark must be the
murderer, remove the débris, and proceed with the investigation—and in
due course, with the inquest.
Milne is aware of one very difficult hurdle and tries as well as he can
to get over it. Since the secretary is going to murder Mark, once Mark
has established himself as Robert, the impersonation has to continue and
fool the police. Since, also, everybody around the Red House knows Mark
intimately, disguise is necessary. This is achieved by shaving off
Mark’s beard, roughening his hands (“not the hands of a manicured
gentleman”—testimony), and the use of a gruff voice and rough manner.
But this is not enough. The cops are going to have the body and the
clothes on it and whatever is in the pockets. Therefore none of this

must suggest Mark. Milne therefore works like a switch engine to put
over the motivation that Mark is such a thoroughly conceited performer
that he dresses the part down to the socks and underwear (from all of
which the secretary has removed the maker’s labels), like a ham blacking
himself all over to play Othello. If the reader will buy this (and the
sales record shows he must have), Milne figures he is solid. Yet,
however light in texture the story may be, it is offered as a problem of
logic and deduction.
If it is not that, it is nothing at all. There is nothing else for it to
be. If the situation is false, you cannot even accept it as a light
novel, for there is no story for the light novel to be about. If the
problem does not contain the elements of truth and plausibility, it is
no problem; if the logic is an illusion, there is nothing to deduce. If
the impersonation is impossible once the reader is told the conditions
it must fulfill, then the whole thing is a fraud. Not a deliberate
fraud, because Milne would not have written the story if he had known
what he was up against. He is up against a number of deadly things, none
of which he even considers. Nor, apparently, does the casual reader, who
wants to like the story—hence takes it at its face value. But the
reader is not called upon to know the facts of life when the author does
not. The author is the expert in the case.
Here is what this author ignores:
1. The coroner holds formal jury inquest on a body for which no legal
competent identification is offered. A coroner, usually in a big city,
will sometimes hold inquest on a body that cannot be identified, if
the record of such an inquest has or may have a value (fire, disaster,
evidence of murder). No such reason exists here, and there is no one to
identify the body. Witnesses said the man said he was Robert Ablett.
This is mere presumption, and has weight only if nothing conflicts with
it. Identification is a condition precedent to an inquest. It is a
matter of law. Even in death a man has a right to his own identity. The
coroner will, wherever humanly possible, enforce that right. To neglect
it would be a violation of his office.
2. Since Mark Ablett, missing and suspected of the murder, cannot defend
himself, all evidence of his movements before and after the murder is
vital (as also whether he has money to run away on); yet all such
evidence is given by the man closest to the murder and is without
corroboration. It is automatically suspect until proved true.

3. The police find by direct investigation that Robert Ablett was not
well thought of in his native village. Somebody there must have known
him. No such person was brought to the inquest. (The story couldn’t
stand it.)
4. The police know there is an element of threat in Robert’s supposed
visit, and that it is connected with the murder must be obvious to them.
Yet they make no attempt to check Robert in Australia, or find out what
character he had there, or what associates, or even if he actually came
to England, and with whom. (If they had, they would have found out he
had been dead three years.)
5. The police surgeon examines a body with a recently shaved beard
(exposing unweathered skin) and artificially roughened hands, but it is
the body of a wealthy, soft-living man, long resident in a cool climate.
Robert was a rough individual and had lived fifteen years in Australia.
That is the surgeon’s information. It is impossible he would have
noticed nothing to conflict with it.
6. The clothes are nameless, empty, and have had the labels removed. Yet
the man wearing them asserted an identity. The presumption that he was
not what he said he was is overpowering. Nothing whatever is done about
his peculiar circumstance. It is never even mentioned as being peculiar.
7. A man is missing, a well-known local man, and a body in the morgue
closely resembles him. It is impossible that the police should not at
once eliminate the chance that the missing man is the dead man.
Nothing would be easier than to prove it. Not even to think of it is
incredible. It makes idiots of the police, so that a brash amateur may
startle the world with a fake solution.
The detective in the case is an insouciant amateur named Anthony
Gillingham, a nice lad with a cheery eye, a nice little flat in town,
and that airy manner. He is not making any money on the assignment, but
is always available when the local gendarmerie loses its notebook. The
English police endure him with their customary stoicism, but I shudder
to think what the boys down at the Homicide Bureau in my city would do
to him.
* * * * *
There are even less plausible examples of the art than this. In Trent’s
Last Case (often called “the perfect detective story”) you have to

accept the premise that a giant of international finance, whose lightest
frown makes Wall Street quiver like a chihuahua, will plot his own death
so as to hang his secretary, and that the secretary when pinched will
maintain an aristocratic silence—the old Etonian in him, maybe. I have
known relatively few international financiers, but I rather think the
author of this novel has (if possible) known fewer.
There is another one, by Freeman Wills Crofts (the soundest builder of
them all when he doesn’t get too fancy), wherein a murderer, by the aid
of make-up, split-second timing and some very sweet evasive action,
impersonates the man he has just killed and thereby gets him alive and
distant from the place of the crime. There is one by Dorothy Sayers in
which a man is murdered alone at night in his house by a mechanically
released weight which works because he always turns the radio on at just
such a moment, always stands in just such a position in front of it, and
always bends over just so far. A couple of inches either way and the
customers would get a rain check. This is what is vulgarly known as
having God sit in your lap; a murderer who needs that much help from
Providence must be in the wrong business.
And there is a scheme of Agatha Christie’s featuring M. Hercule Poirot,
that ingenious Belgian who talks in a literal translation of school-boy
French. By duly messing around with his “little gray cells” M. Poirot
decides that since nobody on a certain through sleeper could have done
the murder alone, everybody did it together, breaking the process down
into a series of simple operations like assembling an egg beater. This
is the type that is guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop.
Only a halfwit could guess it.
There are much better plots by these same writers and by others of their
school. There may be one somewhere that would really stand up under
close scrutiny. It would be fun to read it, even if I did have to go
back to page 47 and refresh my memory about exactly what time the second
gardener potted the prize-winning tea-rose begonia. There is nothing new
about these stories and nothing old. The ones I mentioned are all
English because the authorities, such as they are, seem to feel that the
English writers had an edge in this dreary routine and that the
Americans, even the creator of Philo Vance, only make the Junior
Varsity.
This, the classic detective story, has learned nothing and forgotten
nothing. It is the story you will find almost any week in the big shiny
magazines, handsomely illustrated, and paying due deference to virginal

love and the right kind of luxury goods. Perhaps the tempo has become a
trifle faster and the dialogue a little more glib. There are more frozen
daiquiris and stingers and fewer glasses of crusty old port, more
clothes by Vogue and décors by House Beautiful, more chic, but not
more truth. We spend more time in Miami hotels and Cape Cod summer
colonies and go not so often down by the old gray sundial in the
Elizabethan garden.
But fundamentally it is the same careful grouping of suspects, the same
utterly incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington
Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poniard just as she flatted on
the top note of the “Bell Song” from Lakmé in the presence of fifteen
ill-assorted guests; the same ingénue in fur-trimmed pajamas screaming
in the night to make the company pop in and out of doors and ball up the
timetable; the same moody silence next day as they sit around sipping
Singapore slings and sneering at each other, while the flatfeet crawl to
and fro under the Persian rugs, with their derby hats on.
Personally I like the English style better. It is not quite so brittle
and the people as a rule just wear clothes and drink drinks. There is
more sense of background, as if Cheesecake Manor really existed all
around and not just in the part the camera sees; there are more long
walks over the downs and the characters don’t all try to behave as if
they had just been tested by MGM. The English may not always be the best
writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
* * * * *
There is a very simple statement to be made about all these stories:
they do not really come off intellectually as problems, and they do not
come off artistically as fiction. They are too contrived, and too little
aware of what goes on in the world. They try to be honest, but honesty
is an art. The poor writer is dishonest without knowing it, and the
fairly good one can be dishonest because he doesn’t know what to be
honest about. He thinks a complicated murder scheme which baffled the
lazy reader, who won’t be bothered itemizing the details, will also
baffle the police, whose business is with details.
The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case
in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with;
the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody thought of only
two minutes before he pulled it off. But if the writers of this fiction
wrote about the kind of murders that happen, they would also have to

write about the authentic flavor of life as it is lived. And since they
cannot do that, they pretend that what they do is what should be done.
Which is begging the question—and the best of them know it.
In her introduction to the first Omnibus of Crime, Dorothy Sayers
wrote: “It [the detective story] does not, and by hypothesis never can,
attain the loftiest level of literary achievement.” And she suggested
somewhere else that this is because it is a “literature of escape” and
not “a literature of expression.” I do not know what the loftiest level
of literary achievement is: neither did Aeschylus or Shakespeare;
neither does Miss Sayers. Other things being equal, which they never
are, a more powerful theme will provoke a more powerful performance. Yet
some very dull books have been written about God, and some very fine
ones about how to make a living and stay fairly honest. It is always a
matter of who writes the stuff, and what he has in him to write it with.
As for “literature of expression” and “literature of escape”—this is
critics’ jargon, a use of abstract words as if they had absolute
meanings. Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality:
there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All men who read escape
from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality
of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional
necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their
private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking
beings. It is one of the things that distinguish them from the
three-toed sloth; he apparently—one can never be quite sure—is
perfectly content hanging upside down on a branch, not even reading
Walter Lippmann. I hold no particular brief for the detective story as
the ideal escape. I merely say that all reading for pleasure is
escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or
The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an
intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.
I do not think such considerations moved Miss Dorothy Sayers to her
essay in critical futility.
I think what was really gnawing at Miss Sayers’ mind was the slow
realization that her kind of detective story was an arid formula which
could not even satisfy its own implications. It was second-grade
literature because it was not about the things that could make
first-grade literature. If it started out to be about real people (and
she could write about them—her minor characters show that), they must
very soon do unreal things in order to form the artificial pattern required by the plot. When they did unreal things, they ceased to be

real themselves. They became puppets and cardboard lovers and

papier-mâché villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible

gentility.

The only kind of writer who could be happy with these properties was the

one who did not know what reality was. Dorothy Sayers’ own stories show

that she was annoyed by this triteness; the weakest element in them is

the part that makes them detective stories, the strongest the part which

could be removed without touching the “problem of logic and deduction.”

Yet she could not or would not give her characters their heads and let

them make their own mystery. It took a much simpler and more direct mind

than hers to do that.

* * * * *

In The Long Week End, which is a drastically competent account of

English life and manners in the decades following the First World War,

Robert Graves and Alan Hodge gave some attention to the detective story.

They were just as traditionally English as the ornaments of the Golden

Age, and they wrote of the time in which these writers were almost as

well known as any writers in the world. Their books in one form or

another sold into the millions, and in a dozen languages. These were the

people who fixed the form and established the rules and founded the

famous Detection Club, which is a Parnassus of English writers of

mystery. Its roster includes practically every important writer of

detective fiction since Conan Doyle.

But Graves and Hodge decided that during this whole period only one

first-class writer had written detective stories at all. An American,

Dashiell Hammett. Traditional or not, Graves and Hodge were not

fuddyduddy connoisseurs of the second-rate; they could see what went on

in the world and that the detective story of their time didn’t; and they

were aware that writers who have the vision and the ability to produce

real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.

How original a writer Hammett really was it isn’t easy to decide now,

even if it mattered. He was one of a group—the only one who achieved

critical recognition—who wrote or tried to write realistic mystery

fiction. All literary movements are like this; some one individual is

picked out to represent the whole movement; he is usually the

culmination of the movement. Hammett was the ace performer, but there is

nothing in his work that is not implicit in the early novels and short

stories of Hemingway.

Yet, for all I know, Hemingway, may have learned something from Hammett

as well as from writers like Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Carl Sandburg,

Sherwood Anderson, and himself. A rather revolutionary debunking of both

the language and the material of fiction had been going on for some

time. It probably started in poetry; almost everything does. You can

take it clear back to Walt Whitman, if you like. But Hammett applied it

to the detective story, and this, because of its heavy crust of English

gentility and American pseudogentility, was pretty hard to get moving.

I doubt that Hammett had any deliberate artistic aims whatever; he was

trying to make a living by writing something he had firsthand

information about. He made some of it up; all writers do; but it had a

basis in fact; it was made up out of real things. The only reality the

English detection writers knew was the conversational accent of Surbiton

and Bognor Regis. If they wrote about dukes and Venetian vases, they

knew no more about them out of their own experience than the well-heeled

Hollywood character knows about the French Modernists that hang in his

Bel-Air château or the semi-antique Chippendale-cum-cobbler’s bench that

he uses for a coffee table. Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase

and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever,

but it looked like a good idea to get as far as possible from Emily

Post’s idea of how a well-bred débutante gnaws a chicken wing.

Hammett wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp,

aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of

things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right

down their street. Hammett 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 hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish. He

put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and

think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.

He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a

language not supposed to be capable of such refinements. They thought

they were getting a good meaty melodrama written in the kind of lingo

they imagined they spoke themselves. It was, in a sense, but it was much

more. All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at

that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it

only looks like speech. Hammett’s style at its worst was as formalized

as a page of Marius the Epicurean; at its best it could say almost

anything. I believe this style, which does not belong to Hammett or to

anybody, but is the American language (and not even exclusively that any

more), can say things he did not know how to say, or feel the need of

saying. In his hands it had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image

beyond a distant hill.

Hammett is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought

the most of is the record of a man’s devotion to a friend. He was spare,

frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best

writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have

been written before.

* * * * *

With all this he did not wreck the formal detective story. Nobody can;

production demands a form that can be produced. Realism takes too much

talent, too much knowledge, too much awareness. Hammett may have

loosened it up a little here, and sharpened it a little there. Certainly

all but the stupidest and most meretricious writers are more conscious

of their artificiality than they used to be. And he demonstrated that

the detective story can be important writing. The Maltese Falcon may

or may not be a work of genius, but an art which is capable of it is not

“by hypothesis” incapable of anything. Once a detective story can be as

good as this, only the pedants will deny that it could be even better.

Hammett did something else; he made the detective story fun to write,

not an exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues. Without him

there might not have been a regional mystery as clever as Percival

Wilde’s Inquest, or an ironic study as able as Raymond Postgate’s

Verdict of Twelve, or a savage piece of intellectual double-talk like

Kenneth Fearing’s The Dagger of the Mind, or a tragi-comic

idealization of the murderer as in Donald Henderson’s Mr. Bowling Buys

a Newspaper, or even a gay Hollywoodian gambol like Richard Sale’s

Lazarus No. 7.

The realistic style is easy to abuse: from haste, from lack of

awareness, from inability to bridge the chasm that lies between what a

writer would like to be able to say and what he actually knows how to

say. It is easy to fake; brutality is not strength, flipness is not wit,

edge-of-the-chair writing can be as boring as flat writing; dalliance

with promiscuous blondes can be very dull stuff when described by goaty

young men with no other purpose in mind than to describe dalliance with

promiscuous blondes. There has been so much of this sort of thing that

if a character in a detective story says “Yeah,” the author is

automatically a Hammett imitator.

And there are still a number of people around who say that Hammett did

not write detective stories at all—merely hard-boiled chronicles of

mean streets with a perfunctory mystery element dropped in like the

olive in a martini. These are the flustered old ladies—of both sexes

(or no sex) and almost all ages—who like their murders scented with

magnolia blossoms and do not care to be reminded that murder is an act

of infinite cruelty, even if the perpetrators sometimes look like

playboys or college professors or nice motherly women with softly

graying hair.

There are also a few badly scared champions of the formal or classic

mystery who think that no story is a detective story which does not pose

a formal and exact problem and arrange the clues around it with neat

labels on them. Such would point out, for example, that in reading _The

Maltese Falcon_ no one concerns himself with who killed Spade’s partner,

Archer (which is the only formal problem of the story), because the

reader is kept thinking about something else. Yet in The Glass Key the

reader is constantly reminded that the question is who killed Taylor

Henry, and exactly the same effect is obtained—an effect of movement,

intrigue, cross-purposes, and the gradual elucidation of character,

which is all the detective story has any right to be about anyway. The

rest is spillikins in the parlor.

* * * * *

But all this (and Hammett too) is for me not quite enough. The realist

in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and

almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated

restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in

which a screen star can be the finger man for a mob, and the nice man

down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge

with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a

pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned

murder as an instrument of money-making, where no man can walk down a

dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but

refrain from practicing; a world where you may witness a holdup in broad

daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the

crowd rather than tell anyone, because the holdup men may have friends

with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any

case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you

in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the

most perfunctory interference from a political judge.

It is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain

writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very

interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a

man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed

for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call

civilization. All this still is not quite enough.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and

irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down

these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither

tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a

man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a

common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered

phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought

of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his

world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his

private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might

seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he

is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.

He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He

is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense

of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money

dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate

revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as

a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of

his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque,

a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it

would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.

He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by

right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough

like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without

becoming too dull to be worth living in.

 

Raymond Chandler, The Simple Act Of Murder.  Atlantic Monthly, December 1944.