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.

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Ed West

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Nevertheless it’s surely unsatisfactory that the crime novel is so often dismissed as ‘genre fiction’. Of course most crime novels are poor — but then so are most novels categorised as ‘literary’. They may bear reading once, but rarely twice. Again, crime novels, especially those of the police procedural type, are easily weighed down, and often sunk, by pseudo-realistic detail which the reader may well choose to skip. None of this alters the fact that the crime novelist deals with essential and metaphysical realities. That very fine writer, Nicholas Freeling, in a collection of essays entitled Criminal Convictions, went so far as to claim that ‘in prose fiction, crime is the pre-eminent, and often predominant, theme’. To prove his point the writers whose work he examines are: Stendhal, Dickens, Conrad, Conan Doyle, Kipling, Chandler, Sayers, Simenon.