The rewards of crime

Raymond Chandler once praised Dashiell Hammett for having given murder back to the sort of people who committed it. One knows what he meant; away with murders at the vicarage or on the Orient Express (where, however, a good few have doubtless taken place). Yet it wasn’t really a very intelligent observation because all sorts of people, even little old ladies and clergymen, do in fact commit murder. In any case, what used to be called ‘the hard-boiled crime novel’, even Chandler’s own, marvellous as the best three or four of them are, is often as far from realism as the classic English detective novel. Marlowe himself is a romanticised figure, which is why he was best played by Bogart, and the Hollywood scenes in that sometimes brilliant but flawed novel, The Little Sister, are as embarrassing to read now as the exchanges between Lord Peter Wimsey and, well, anyone with whom Wimsey is in conversation.