Reading Nicholas Blake’s classic British mystery The Beast Must Die (1938) for the first time in 1950, the great American hard-boiled detective novelist Raymond Chandler was moved to reflect, in a letter to librarian and future mystery critic James Sandoe, on his intense disappointment with the novel. Initially, Chandler wrote, he had found Beast “damn good and extremely well written.” Unfortunately, “the entrance of the detective, Nigel Strangeways, an amateur with wife tagging along,” had for him a “devastating effect” on the credibility of Blake’s crime tale. Conceding that the “private eye” (the type of detective associated most prominently with his own work and that of his contemporary Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald) “admittedly is an exaggeration—a fantasy,” Chandler asserted nevertheless that while the private eye at least was “an exaggeration of the possible,” the “amateur gentleman who outthinks Scotland Yard is just plain silly.” In fictional mystery, the hard-boiled icon concluded peremptorily, “the amateur detective just won’t do.”
Raymond Chandler’s best known expression of aversion to British detective fiction is found in his deliberately polemical 1944 Atlantic Monthly essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in which Chandler, starting from the premise that “fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic,” corrosively contrasts the classical fair play puzzle mystery most associated with Great Britain (though in fact, as Chandler readily concedes, many mysteries of this sort were written by Americans as well) with what he sees as the much truer-to-life hard-boiled detective novel. Chandler’s frequently scathing commentary on English detective novelists in “The Simple Art of Murder” has led most mystery genre critics to conclude that the hard-boiled crime writer held classical English mystery entirely and utterly in contempt.
“Chandler despised the English school of crime writing,” pronounces the late modern English Crime Queen P. D. James in her short genre survey, Talking about Detective Fiction (2009). Similar pearls of conventional wisdom have been placed before us by authorities who similarly have overgeneralized Chandler’s hostility toward the puzzle-oriented English detective novel. In The Life of Raymond Chandler, for example, Frank MacShane sweepingly refers to “Chandler’s dislike of deductive detective stories,” while in Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories, the academic scholar Leonard Cassuto categorically declares that “Chandler rejects the puzzle-whodunit.” Such pearls may make an exquisitely matched strand, yet the conventional wisdom that produced them is far less persuasive when given greater scrutiny. (Perhaps we would do well here to recall that Raymond Chandler once wrote a short story called “Pearls Are a Nuisance.”)
Only two years after the appearance in print of “The Simple Art of Murder” Chandler himself pacifically urged a correspondent, mystery genre historian Howard Haycraft, “You must not take a polemic piece of writing like my own article from the Atlantic too literally. I could have written a piece of propaganda in favor of the detective story just as easily. All polemic writing is over-stated.” While Chandler, like the American literary critic Edmund Wilson (author of “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” published in the New Yorker in 1945), admittedly disdained the most famous exponents of the classical English mystery, including the Crime Queens Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh, he elsewhere expressed admiration for a pair of today less heralded classical English detective novelists, R. Austin Freeman and Freeman Wills Crofts. Chandler’s animus was more directed against British gentleman amateur sleuths than it was British detective fiction per se.
In analyzing “The Simple Art of Murder” writers tend to focus on Chandler’s criticism of artificiality within the mystery genre, yet in his essay Chandler in fact spends much of his time blasting the classical English detective novel on what clearly are class-related grounds. While he scourges A. A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery (1922), for example, for its illogic and lack of realism, Chandler notably reserves sharp stripes as well for Milne’s privileged and leisured amateur sleuth, “an insouciant gent named Antony Gillingham.” After sardonically describing Milne’s Gillingham as “a nice lad with a cheery eye, a cozy little flat in London, and that airy manner,” Chandler derisively adds of the man: “He is not making any money on the assignment, but is always available when the local gendarmerie loses its notebook. The English police seem to endure him with their customary stoicism; but I shudder to think of what the boys down at the Homicide Bureau in my city would do to him.”
Throughout his “Simple Art” essay, Chandler repeatedly sounds cutting class notes. When praising his hard-boiled predecessor Dashiell Hammett for bringing something fundamentally new and bracingly authentic to the detective fiction genre, Chandler tellingly complains of English mystery novelists larding their tales with “dukes and Venetian vases.” In a famous statement, Chandler declares that “Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it was a good idea to begin by getting as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing.” Later he lauds Hammett (and by implication himself) for giving “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 with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.” Elsewhere Chandler sneers at English “detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility.”
What specific exquisitely and impossibly genteel English detectives could Chandler have been writing about here? It could hardly have been Freeman Wills Crofts’ Inspector (later Superintendent) Joseph French and R. Austin Freeman’s medical jurist Dr. John Thorndyke, both of whom are sober and earnest professionals. In addition to Nicholas Blake’s Nigel Strangeways and A. A. Milne’s Antony Gillingham (the latter of whom who only ever appeared in one novel), those “detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility” to whom Chandler refers so scathingly in “Simple Art” must have been those fictive creations of Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham, three British Crime Queens who at this time (the early to mid-1940s) had risen—along with the fourth British Crime Queen, Agatha Christie—to preeminence in the field of classical British mystery. Chandler did not in fact despise the entire “English school of crime writing,” as P. D. James asserted. He despised the genteel detective school of crime writing that since the 1940s has been most strongly associated with Sayers, Marsh and Allingham.
In personal correspondence written after the publication of “Simple Art,” Chandler makes manifest his distaste for the posh detectives of the British Crime Queens (and their male attendants). Though he never actually mentions Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion (supposedly in line for the English throne, even), Chandler does reference Dorothy L. Sayers a number of times, as well as Ngaio Marsh and Nicholas Blake. The father of this genteel breed, Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, obviously was quite loathed by Chandler. After sitting down in 1951 with Sayers’ today much esteemed crime novel, Gaudy Night (1935), Chandler could only report suffering pangs of literary nausea: “God, what sycophantic drivel. A whole clutch of lady dons at an Oxford college all in a flutter to know about Lord Peter Wimsey and to know about the plot of Harriet Vane’s latest mystery story. How silly can you get?” The previous year Chandler had also made clear that he objected to genteel detectives’ exceptionally accomplished wives, noting acerbically after reading Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die that “this wife [of Blake’s series detective, Nigel Strangeways] is one of the world’s three greatest female explorers, which puts her in the same distinguished, and to me utterly silly, class as the artist wife of Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn.”
On another occasion in 1951, Chandler ruminated further on the question of why he so much disliked the Wimseyish sort of detective. “I don’t deny the mystery writer the privilege of making his detective any sort of a person he wants to make him—a poet, philosopher, student of ceramics or Egyptology, or a master of all the sciences like Dr. Thorndike [sic],” Chandler declared. “What I don’t seem to cotton to is the affectation of gentility which does not belong to the job and which is in effect a subconscious expression of snobbery.” Chandler speculated that, having attended an English public school himself, he “knew these birds inside out” and appreciated that “the only kind of Public School man who could make a real detective would be the Public School man in revolt, like George Orwell.”
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Whence did Raymond Chandler derive his withering scorn for the Wimseys of the fictional detective world? Some have speculated that Chandler simply did not like women mystery writers, but in fact over the years he praised a goodly number of the members of the deadly sisterhood, many of them authors associated with the “domestic suspense” school of crime fiction, like Dorothy B. Hughes, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding and Charlotte Armstrong. Rather, I believe that, as the above reference to his public school days suggests, Chandler’s earlier life experiences were the key influence on his views of detective fiction. After her divorce from his American father, Chandler’s Anglo-Irish mother returned home with young Raymond, to live off the sometimes grudging bounty of wealthy relatives. Early in life Chandler learned to despise the snobbishness of the genteel British with whom he was thrown into association as a poor relation. A 1954 letter the author wrote to his English publisher Hamish Hamilton is quite revealing in this respect:
“My grandmother referred to one of the nicest families we knew as ‘very respectable people’ because there were two sons, five golden haired but unmarriageable daughters and no servant. They were driven to the utter humiliation of answering their own door….My grandmother was the widow of an Irish solicitor. Her son, very wealthy later on, was also a solicitor and had a housekeeper named Miss Groome who sneered at him behind his back because he wasn’t a barrister. The Church, the Navy, the Army, the Bar. There was nothing else. Outside Waterford in a big house with gardens and gardens lived a Miss Paul who occasionally, very occasionally, invited Miss Groome to tea on account of her father had been a canon. Miss Groome regarded this as the supreme accolade because Miss Paul was country. It didn’t seem to bother Miss Paul but it sure as hell made a wreck of Miss Groome….My uncle was a man of rather evil temper on occasion. Sometimes when the dinner did not suit him he would order it removed and we would sit in stony silence for three quarters of an hour while the frantic Miss Groome browbeat the domestics below stairs and finally another meal was delivered to the master, probably much worse than the one he had refused; but I can still feel that silence.
A strange and puzzling thing, the English snobbishness….”
In another letter Chandler plaintively reflects of his English youth: “Nor was I at all a happy young man. I had very little money, although there was a great deal of it in my family.”
“The Remarkable Hero,” an essay by Chandler published in a journal called The Academy in 1911 (when he was but 23 and residing in England), gives contemporary evidence that Chandler’s animus against the genteel detective extended back to his early days. In this essay, Chandler writes sarcastically of the past dominance in English fiction of well-birthed and bred heroes (including detectives): “The time is not distant beyond the memory of living men when the hero of a typical novel had to be, if not a person of title, at any rate a man of tolerable family. If, in the days of his affluence, he did not possess a valet, or if when leaving home under a cloud he could not bestow his last sovereign on a head gardener, he was not likely to have many admirers. The snobbishness of those days was not greater than the snobbishness of these, but it was far simpler and more straightforward. It demanded quite honestly, on behalf of the middle class reader, to mix with its social betters.” No doubt decades later, in the 1930s and 1940s, Chandler was appalled to find that this breed of hero, for which he had always felt contempt, had not in fact perished but to the contrary flourished, at least in the sort of British detective fiction that Sayers, Marsh and Allingham were producing.
Chandler’s feelings of resentment toward what he saw as the snobbishness of the undeserving wealthy only intensified in his adult life, after he had moved back to the United States. An executive in the oil business, Chandler was fired for alcohol-induced absenteeism at the age of 44. Only then did he embark on the arduous course of attempting to make a living through crime writing. After six years of publishing stories in pulp fiction magazines like Black Mask, Chandler in 1939 (at the age of 51) produced a landmark mystery novel, The Big Sleep. Yet even after the appearance of The Big Sleep and other genre classics like Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and The Long Goodbye (1953), Chandler’s deeply ingrained hostility and scorn for what he saw as moral nullities unjustly better off than he very much remained.
Chandler’s comments in a 1956 letter to the British crime writer Michael Gilbert about his neighbors in La Jolla, California (the city with the highest home prices in the United States in 2008 and 2009) were scathing: “La Jolla is no place in which to live….There is no one to talk to. All the well-to-do and almost well-to-do crowd accomplish in their lives is an overdecorated home….” Perhaps Chandler summed up his attitude most pithily in this statement from a 1945 letter: “P[hilip] Marlowe [Chandler’s private eye] and I do not despise the upper class because they take baths and have money; we despise them because they are phony.”
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Clearly the sophisticated and genteel milieus found in the detective novels of Sayers, Marsh and Allingham could not have been much better designed by deliberate intent to grate on Chandler’s class sensitive nerves. The hard-boiled author felt much differently, however, about the plainer mystery fare offered by Freeman Wills Crofts and, especially, R. Austin Freeman. Even in “The Simple Art of Murder,” where he criticized what he saw as the overelaborate plotting of British detective novels, Chandler praised Freeman Wills Crofts, best known for his methodical tales of patient criminal investigation and determined alibi busting, as “the soundest builder of them all when he doesn’t get too fancy.” Moreover, in his correspondence Chandler admitted that he knew Crofts’ work (and Freeman’s) “very well.” Chandler conceded that he found Crofts’ writing style “dull”; yet he also noted that he in fact had enjoyed “some very pedestrian [mystery] stories, because they were unpretentious and because their mysteries were rooted in hard facts and not in false motivations cooked up for the purpose of mystifying a reader.” Chandler speculated that “the attraction of the pedestrian books is their documentary quality.” Any attempt to garnish a mystery story with “chichi and glamour turns my stomach immediately,” Chandler revealingly declared. “I don’t care for the week-end chichi either here or in England.”
Of the work of R. Austin Freeman, a contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle’s who published a long line of mystery novels and stories between 1907 and 1942 and was one of the great mystery genre pioneers of forensic detection, the frequently tart Chandler often wrote with surprising sweetness. Chandler deemed Austin Freeman, like Freeman Crofts, an honest and honorable mystery performer who did not falsify character and clues to unfairly mislead the reader. “They don’t tell lies or conceal material facts or, as Agatha Christie so often does, ring in violent reversals of character in order to justify an unexpected motivation,” asserted Chandler of these two English detective novelists.
Austin Freeman is one of the mystery authors most consistently and highly praised by Chandler in his published correspondence. On one occasion Chandler offered more tempered enthusiasm for Dr. Thorndyke’s creator, yet he concluded by asserting, “I have a very high regard for Freeman. His writing is stilted, but it is never dull in the sense that Crofts’ writing is dull. That is to say, it is never flat. It is merely old-fashioned.” Moreover, Chandler declared, Freeman’s “problems are always interesting in themselves, and the expositions at the end are masterpieces of lucid analysis.”
Chandler is most lavish with Freeman encomia in a 1949 letter to Hamish Hamilton. In this remarkably effusive missive Chandler’s praise of the older author is unbounded, even including a categorical defense of Freeman’s writing style: “This man Austin Freeman is a wonderful performer. He has no equal in his genre [Chandler means the primarily ratiocinative or deductive mystery tale] and he is also a much better writer than you might think, if you were superficially inclined, because in spite of the immense leisure of his writing he accomplished an even suspense which is quite unexpected. The apparatus of his writing makes for dullness, but he is not dull. There is even a gaslight charm about his Victorian love affairs …. Freeman has so many distinctions as a technician that one is apt to forget that within his literary tradition he is a damn good writer …. His knowledge is vast and real.”
Chandler lauds R. Austin Freeman in “Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story,” an interesting though frequently overlooked essay that Chandler drafted sometime in the late 1940s but never published in his lifetime. A non-polemical piece (in contrast with “The Simple Art of Murder”), “Twelve Notes” indicates that in his role as a practical mystery writer Chandler had more in common with the school of classical English detection than a reading of “The Simple Art of Murder” alone would suggest (the two pieces really should be read in conjunction with one another). Scholar Charles Rzepka has acutely observed that Chandler’s “Twelve Notes” are couched in language that would not have been “out of place at a meeting of the Detection Club.”
Despite his chest-beating in “Simple Art,” in his private correspondence Chandler often lamented the difficulty he had plotting his mysteries (this is particularly true of The Little Sister, 1949, which Chandler’s letters reveal was published after years of struggle on his part). In “Twelve Notes” Chandler concedes the importance of having some sort of formal fair play problem in a detective novel and offers R. Austin Freeman as a model in this regard. “Some of the best detective stories ever written,” the hard-boiled author avows, were penned by Austin Freeman. Moreover, Chandler offers Freeman, in contrast with Agatha Christie, as an example of a mystery author who lived up to Chandler’s Rule #2: “[The mystery story] must be technically sound as to the methods of murder and detection.” In Freeman’s The Red Thumb Mark (1907), the impressed Chandler approvingly notes, the author had produced “a story about a forged fingerprint ten years before police method realized such things could be done.”
In “Twelve Notes” Chandler equates Freeman with Chandler’s great hard-boiled contemporary, Dashiell Hammett, postulating that the two men represented peak (though polar) achievements in the two key elements of mystery fiction: puzzle plotting and narrative style. “The perfect detective story cannot be written,” Chandler insists. “The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing. It would be nice to have Dashiell Hammett and Austin Freeman in the same book, but it just isn’t possible. Hammett couldn’t have the plodding patience and Freeman couldn’t have the verve for narrative. They don’t go together. Even a fair compromise such as Dorothy Sayers is less satisfying than the two types taken separately.”
Chandler himself, in an astonishing burst of literary creativity between 1940 and 1943, made impressive stabs at combining puzzle plotting with narrative style in the three novels he published after The Big Sleep and prior to writing “Twelve Notes”: Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window and The Lady in the Lake. Perhaps anxious to downplay their man’s status as a “mere” mystery writer, Chandler’s biographers have been far too accepting of the author’s protestations that he cared nothing for puzzle plotting in his own detective novels. To be sure, intricate yet simultaneously clarified plotting obviously did not come easily to Chandler. “I wish I had one of these facile plotting brains, like Erle Gardner [the awesomely prolific author of the immensely popular Perry Mason mysteries] or somebody,” a fretted Chandler wrote in 1944, the same year he had derided complex plotting as “coolie labor” in “The Simple Art of Murder.” “I have good ideas for about four books, but the labor of shaping them into plots appalls me.” Despite the fact that plotting complexly yet clearly was a tremendous creative struggle for Chandler, the author arduously engaged in that struggle and in several of his novels emerged triumphant. In my view Chandler’s own fierce plotting battles led him to better appreciate the “honest” toil of such traditionalist British authors as Freeman Wills Crofts and R. Austin Freeman.
In contrast with “The Simple Art of Murder,” in “Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story” Raymond Chandler does not elevate the American hard-boiled tale as infinitely superior to the classic British clue puzzle story. To the contrary, Chandler modestly rejects the notion that absolute perfection in the mystery novel is possible and he allows that there is merit to be found in works produced by authors from both schools of mystery fiction. Although Chandler in truth believed that classical English detection had artistic worth, he most certainly rated some fictional English detectives higher than others. As himself a “Public School man in revolt”—and one with a vast array of chips on his shoulder collected from his earliest years—the creator of Philip Marlowe vastly preferred the literary company of the stolid Dr. Thorndyke and Inspector French to that of the stylish band of airy gentlemen sleuths headed by Messrs. Alleyn, Campion and Wimsey.
