Mount TBR #23

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

The Simple Art of Murder – Raymond Chandler

I read the Ballantine Books paperback, published in February, 1972 that featured the 1944 essay of the title and four stories: “Spanish Blood,” “I’ll Be Waiting,” “The King in Yellow,” and “Pearls are a Nuisance.” The stories are about small-town gangsters, grumpy policemen, ragged show girls, corrupt politicians, greedy lawyers, aging lawbreakers, tough detectives, cheap gunsels, insane killers, crazy musicians, mysterious women, seedy janitors and many others. Chandler convincingly describes the milieu in which the stories are based, and three of the stories are the length of a novella.

“The Simple Art of Murder” is a 1944 essay that dismisses classic whodunnits in the British manner as fantastic, calls for detective fiction to be more realistic, and lists the attributes of his ideal detective hero. The early pulp story “Spanish Blood” is one violent scene after another, giving readers of Black Mask what they wanted.  “I’ll Be Waiting,” at 20 pages in length, is the only true short story and has evocative descriptions and a bleak ending if not much more. “The King in Yellow” is a fast-moving tale of a house detective who never says “Die.” “Pearls are a Nuisance” is a satire on the stereotypical character of the drunken society playboy who plays at being a detective.

Chandler admired Dashiell Hammett and imitated him so deftly that at first reading it is hard to distinguish them. They write in the same hard-hitting, sober style, and they feature the same hard boiled heroes, taciturn, impervious to sentimentalism, without illusion about oneself and others, with enough conscience to be obsessed with persisting and resisting in a world where two out of three people act as if they thought ethics is for ninnies and chumps.

But upon comparing short stories, at least, there are some differences. In The Big Knockover and Nightmare Town, Hammett constructed stories based on his own detective work with the Pinkertons while Chandler, with experience in the insurance business, had to rely primarily on his imagination. And it shows. The mood in Hammett's tales is more sinister and goes with the corrupt world around him, while with Chandler, who has had to imagine everything, the violence seems cartoonish, the characters flimsy, even if the mood is persuasive. In Hammett, the plot becomes complex but the incidents follow their logic (the things people do have their own reasoning), but in Chandler, one damn thing happens after another and there is only mucilage and spirit gum to hold things together. 

In the four stories, the best I can say is that Chandler knows how to describe a scene or a character economically. The metaphors are not as flashy or vulnerable to parody in the stories as they are in the novels. The other attraction is the escapism, with the dingy hotel rooms and the sham fancy nightclubs contrasting with the California sunshine, Pacific sunsets, snazzy Packards, spiced with non-stop intake of nicotine and rye. Just as great as foggy London and snug clubs in Holmes stories.