Crime – Critical Essays
Raymond Chandler on Detective Fiction
• The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and had always been that murder will out and justice
will be done
• The emotional basis of the hard-boiled story is that murder will not out and justice won’t be done unless some
very determined individual makes it his business to see that justice is done in hard dangerous work that
demanded constant action
• The mystery story owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics
• There are no classics in crime writing – a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form
and can never be surpassed - no story or novel of mystery has done that yet
• If the mystery novel is at all realistic it is written in a certain spirit of detachment; otherwise, nobody body but a
psychopath would want to write it or read it
• 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 only thought of 2 minutes before he pulled it off
• Hammett (hard-boiled) 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
• The hard-boiled detective 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 will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence
without 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 takes with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham
and a contempt for pettiness. He is 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
Murder as Social Criticism
• The world of the detective novel is a place of untimely death, cruelty, suspicion, and betrayal
• Perhaps detective fiction produces pleasurable effects by allowing us to feel that no matter how overwhelming
our own situations seem, something much worse is happening to someone else
• The enduring popularity of the detective novel is connected to the acceleration of real and perceived crime,
violence and surveillance over the course of the 19 th and 20th century
• Characters in roman noir tend to kill for money and class ambition but their actions and perception are heavily
determined by “the insurance worldview”, their place in the shift from industrial o post-industrial economy
• One of the defining ideas of the noir narratives is the woman with a secret which is a volatile mixture of
knowledge and deceit. This woman is always dangerous and sometimes powerful, she is also always defeated
• In Noir, women are victims and criminals but never detectives
• One could argue that the very idea of the detective upholds the order based on social inequalities whether
they are male or female, misogynist or feminist, that in fact, the feminist detective might be the greatest
promoter of the patriarchy in that she seduces the female reader into complicity with an order based on her
subjugation
• Many commentators assume that ideology is absent or out of place in a work of fiction which is seen to be an
entertainment consisting of the solution of the puzzle – as of the ‘restoration of order’ did not necessarily imply a
certain kind of order, and ideology, which permeates the characters’ lives and narrative action
• Simply inserting a woman detective into the space created for ale detective will not overthrow the ideological
structure
The Case for Crime Fiction
• The art of crime fiction requires emotional and intellectual honesty and integrity
• In cozy crime, somebody gets killed but nobody gets hurt
• On the other end, there are hard-boiled novels where far too many people got killed
• In real life, not all problems are neatly resolved
• We live in a world that’s managed by a kind of large-scale organised crime. What is a government but
something that exploits one group – in a criminal way a lot of the time – for the benefits of another. We live in a
world in which most of us are being exploited by people who are more powerful and more nefarious than we
are. And so, crime fiction is ultimately a metaphor for the kind of life most of us live
Raymond Chandler on Detective Fiction
• The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and had always been that murder will out and justice
will be done
• The emotional basis of the hard-boiled story is that murder will not out and justice won’t be done unless some
very determined individual makes it his business to see that justice is done in hard dangerous work that
demanded constant action
• The mystery story owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics
• There are no classics in crime writing – a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form
and can never be surpassed - no story or novel of mystery has done that yet
• If the mystery novel is at all realistic it is written in a certain spirit of detachment; otherwise, nobody body but a
psychopath would want to write it or read it
• 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 only thought of 2 minutes before he pulled it off
• Hammett (hard-boiled) 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
• The hard-boiled detective 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 will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence
without 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 takes with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham
and a contempt for pettiness. He is 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
Murder as Social Criticism
• The world of the detective novel is a place of untimely death, cruelty, suspicion, and betrayal
• Perhaps detective fiction produces pleasurable effects by allowing us to feel that no matter how overwhelming
our own situations seem, something much worse is happening to someone else
• The enduring popularity of the detective novel is connected to the acceleration of real and perceived crime,
violence and surveillance over the course of the 19 th and 20th century
• Characters in roman noir tend to kill for money and class ambition but their actions and perception are heavily
determined by “the insurance worldview”, their place in the shift from industrial o post-industrial economy
• One of the defining ideas of the noir narratives is the woman with a secret which is a volatile mixture of
knowledge and deceit. This woman is always dangerous and sometimes powerful, she is also always defeated
• In Noir, women are victims and criminals but never detectives
• One could argue that the very idea of the detective upholds the order based on social inequalities whether
they are male or female, misogynist or feminist, that in fact, the feminist detective might be the greatest
promoter of the patriarchy in that she seduces the female reader into complicity with an order based on her
subjugation
• Many commentators assume that ideology is absent or out of place in a work of fiction which is seen to be an
entertainment consisting of the solution of the puzzle – as of the ‘restoration of order’ did not necessarily imply a
certain kind of order, and ideology, which permeates the characters’ lives and narrative action
• Simply inserting a woman detective into the space created for ale detective will not overthrow the ideological
structure
The Case for Crime Fiction
• The art of crime fiction requires emotional and intellectual honesty and integrity
• In cozy crime, somebody gets killed but nobody gets hurt
• On the other end, there are hard-boiled novels where far too many people got killed
• In real life, not all problems are neatly resolved
• We live in a world that’s managed by a kind of large-scale organised crime. What is a government but
something that exploits one group – in a criminal way a lot of the time – for the benefits of another. We live in a
world in which most of us are being exploited by people who are more powerful and more nefarious than we
are. And so, crime fiction is ultimately a metaphor for the kind of life most of us live
