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The Simple Art of Murder
The Simple Art of Murder (Pocket Books' edition)
Author	Raymond Chandler
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Crime fiction, literary criticism
Publisher	Houghton Mifflin
Publication date	1950
Media type	Print
ISBN	0-394-75765-3
OCLC Number	17506654
Dewey Decimal	813/.52 19
LC Classification	PS3505.H3224 S56 1988

"The Simple Art of Murder" refers to both a critical essay and a collection of short stories written by hard-boiled detective fiction author Raymond Chandler. The essay was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1944. It was reprinted in 1950 by Houghton Mifflin along with eight of Chandler's early stories pre-dating his first novel, The Big Sleep.

The essay is considered a seminal piece of literary criticism. Although Chandler's primary topic is the art (and failings) of detective fiction, he touches on general literature and modern society as well.

The opening statement – "Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic" – places Chandler in a lineage with earlier American Realists, in particular Mark Twain and his critique of James Fenimore Cooper, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses". Chandler dissects A. A. Milne's The Red House Mystery much as Twain tears apart Cooper's The Deerslayer, namely by revealing what is ignored, brushed over, and unrealistic. "If the situation is false," Chandler writes, "you cannot even accept it as a light novel, for there is no story for the light novel to be about." He expands his criticism to the bulk of detective fiction, especially of the English variety which he complains is preoccupied with "hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish." In addition to Milne, Chandler confronts Dame Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, E. C. Bentley, and Freeman Wills Crofts. "The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers." Chandler's critique of the "classic" Golden Age detective story goes beyond a lack of realistic characters and plot; Chandler complains about contrivances and formulas and an inability to move beyond them. The classic detective story "has learned nothing and forgotten nothing."

Chandler reserves his praise for Dashiell Hammett. Although Chandler and Hammett were contemporaries and grouped as the founders of the hard-boiled school, Chandler speaks of him as the "one individual ... picked out to represent the whole movement," noting Hammett's mastery of the "American language", his adherence to reality, and that he "gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse."

Chandler concludes his essay by moving from reality in literature to reality itself, "a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities ... it is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in." He states that this world requires the hero of Hammett's (and his own) fiction, a man who walks the "mean streets" with a sense of honor and a notion of justice, who neither wears them on his sleeve nor allows them to be corrupted.

External links and references

• Chandler, Raymond, (1950), The Simple Art of Murder ISBN 0-394-75765-3
• An excerpt from The Simple Art of Murder at Random House
• The Simple Art of Murder—full essay at The University of Texas' American Literature website
• Chandler and The Simple Art of Murder at The New York Review of Books

From Wikiquote

Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an author of crime stories and novels.

Sourced

• There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
  • "Red Wind" (short story, 1938), published in Trouble Is My Business (1939)

• He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus.
  I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.
  • "Pearls are a Nuisance" (short story, 1939)

• The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law.
  • "Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel" (essay, 1949), first published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)

• Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve the problem. It stacks the cards, and in nine cases out of ten, it eliminates at least two useful suspects. The only effective love interest is that which creates a personal hazard for the detective - but which, at the same time, you instinctively feel to be a mere episode. A really good detective never gets married.
  • "Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel" (essay, 1949), first published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)

• There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.
  • letter, 22 April 1949, published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)

• The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.
  • letter, 19 April 1951, published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)

• The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.
  • "Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story", published in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler(1976)

• [As a screenwriter] I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.
  • "A Qualified Farewell" (essay, early 1950's), published in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler (1976)

• The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.
  • "A Qualified Farewell" (essay, early 1950's), published in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler (1976)

• By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.
  • In a letter to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Hiney, Tom; Frank MacShane (2000). The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. pp. p. 77. ISBN 0871137860.  

The Big Sleep (1939)

• It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
  • opening paragraph, chapter 1

• The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.
  • chapter 2

• A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.
  • chapter 2

• "A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy."
  • chapter 2

• The old man nodded, as if his neck was afraid of the weight of his head.
  • chapter 2

• "I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me."
  • chapter 3

• "Tsk, tsk," I said, not moving at all. "Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You're the second guy I've met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail."
  • chapter 14

Farewell My Lovely (1940)

• Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
  • chapter 1

• He had a battered face that looked as if it had been hit by everything but the bucket of a dragline. It was scarred, flattened, thickened, checkered, and welted. It was a face that had nothing to fear. Everything had been done to it that anybody could think of.
  • chapter 2

• A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.
  • chapter 13

• We sneered at each other across the desk for a moment. He sneered better than I did.
  • chapter 20

• “Who is this Hemingway person at all?”
  “A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.”
  “That must take a hell of a long time,” the big man said.
  • chapter 24

• ...crazy as two waltzing mice.
  • chapter 25

• "They say money don't stink," he said. "I sometimes wonder."
  • chapter 34

• I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
  • chapter 34

The High Window (1942)

• She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak, and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones.
  • chapter 2

• He didn't curl his lip because it had been curled when he came in.
  • chapter 3

• A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.
  • chapter 17

The Lady in the Lake (1943)

• The little blonde at the PBX cocked a shell-like ear and smiled a small fluffy smile. She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens.
  • chapter 1

The Little Sister (1949)

• I hung up.
  It was a step in the right direction, but it didn't go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hid under the desk.
  • chapter 1

The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

short story collection, including the essay of the same name

• Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
  • Introduction

• The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics. It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. But to devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to.
  • Introduction

• There are no 'classics' of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, 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. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel.
  • Introduction

• Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it [the detective story] 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.
  • essay, first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (November, 1945)

• Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective 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. 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.
  • essay, first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (November, 1945)

The Long Goodbye (1954)

• She opened her mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn't hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed.

• When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care. I finished the drink and went to bed.

Playback (1958)

• You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.
  • chapter 14

Attributed

• There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other... the truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.
  • The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler

• Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober.
  • From Hollywood Remembered: An Oral History of Its Golden Age by Paul Zollo

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

Raymond Chandler

• "Chandlerisms" at The Raymond Chandler Web Site
• "Quotations from Chairman Chandler" at The Thrilling Detective Website