New book on the many faces of crime writer Raymond Chandler
Lit REACTOR, fair use Raymond Chandler, along with Dashiell Hammett before him and Ross Macdonald after, effected a startling change in the crime novel. As Chandler put it, he took the novel away from those who commit murder with “hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish” and returned it to “the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.” This passage from Chandler’s essay explaining his technique in “The Simple Art of Murder” is dripping with sarcasm, contempt, and class analysis in its explanation of how the genre had been practiced...
Source: peoplesworld.org