Murder most serious

Raymond Chandler praised Dashiell Hammett for having given murder back to the sort of people who commit it. Given that he himself followed in Hammett’s footsteps, this was an understandable remark, aimed at what might already have been called the classic English detective novel. ‘Can’t read Christie,’ he told someone who had sent him a questionnaire. This wasn’t quite true. In one letter he analyses, intelligently and judiciously, Christie’s Ten Little Niggers; elsewhere, in an essay, ‘Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel’, he wrote that he was ‘quite unmoved to indignation by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’s violation of the rule that “the suppression of facts by the narrator …is a flagrant dishonesty” because the dishonesty is rather cleverly arranged,’ and in any case ‘the whole arrangement of the story and of its dramatis personae makes it clear that the narrator is the only possible murderer.’ He was also lavish in his praise of Michael Innes, most artificial of mystery writers.