[Link] The Moral Character of Philip Marlowe: Complexity and Nuance in the Ethical Life of Chandler’s Detective Hero

by Terry Hyland

The central character in Raymond Chandler’s seven acclaimed detective novels – the private eye, Philip Marlowe – is, according to his creator, a man of honour and a kind of hero and, as a man for our times, an archetype who may be compared to Sherlock Holmes, James Bond or the eponymous stranger in Clint Eastwood’s famous Western movies. Chandler’s novels – though derided by the author himself as pulp fiction and merely escape literature – are now considered to be classical paradigms of a certain kind of hard-boiled detective fiction and appear on English Literature reading lists in colleges and universities throughout the world. In this article, I will be analysing the novels in terms of the moral principles and practice of the central character of Philip Marlowe. In particular, the nuances of ethical conflicts and dilemmas will be explored as Marlowe struggles to navigate his way through the shadowy and morally corrupt world he inhabits, seeking to exact justice without compromising his deeply held core values. Moral education programmes now make extensive use of literary sources and – given the prominence of the type of fiction that Chandler helped to pioneer – I will conclude with examples of the ways in which ethical lessons may be drawn from examining the character of Marlowe.

1. Introduction

Describing the general characteristics of his central character, Marlowe, in The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler writes:

down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour — by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world (p.7).

We first meet this man in the short story Killer in the Rain[2] a palimpsest for the subsequent first novel The Big Sleep[3]. Here we are introduced to a private eye (who previously worked in the assistant district attorney’s office) who is fearless, astute, honest, loyal and clear-sighted in his commitment to righting wrongs and acting with ethical determination in an essentially immoral and chaotic underworld.

Read the full article: https://www.qeios.com/read/H1QWFO

What I Learned from Dead People (Mostly)

No. This isn't a post about me whipping out a Ouija board and contacting the dead, no matter how much I love ghost and horror stories. 

It's just that the bulk of my favorite writers tend to be of the "late" variety. I'm one of the oddball readers who doesn't just call a writer a favorite only because I like their work, but instead they become a favorite more because I learn something from them. I become a better writer because I read them. They influence, nay, infect me with their work. 

That said, I'm really working hard at discovering more living writers who have something to say to me about the craft -- something that isn't just a rehash of the lessons from the already dead folks. (Sure, call me a snob. I've earned it.)

Ernest Hemingway

Papa re-taught me how to write. I totally ignored Hemingway in high school when we read "Indian Camp" and "Hills Like White Elephants," but when I discovered him again in college and tackled books like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, I actually paid attention. 

What I had thought was boring in high school, I later appreciated as direct, succinct, non-flowery. And I loved it. Then, when I took a class on short stories and revisited the Nick Adams stories (and Hills Like White Elephants), I realized I was seated at the foot of a master craftsman in the art of dialogue. He was the first writer I found who let people talk around the things they wanted to say instead of talk about them. 

And that is a lightbulb moment that has followed me in my writing ever since.

Zora Neale Hurston

Woman have the most important keys of all, according to Zora Neal Hurston, in her collected folk tales Men and Mules. Those are the keys to everything that drives a man to want for himself, the kitchen and the bedroom, food and sex, his belly and his, well, you know. 

Hurston never shied away from the truth of her world. Women didn't have the power they deserved. They were treated like second-class citizens, and if one was a black woman, it was closer to third-class, right behind black men. Still, she knew the power and pride and ability she owned as an African-American woman, and those things permeated her works. Their Eyes Were Watching God, even if divorced from her full body of work, shows the life of a woman who was willing to every tool at her disposal to live life on her own terms and to achieve personal freedom, even if she had to move from man to man to man to no man in order to do it. 

In short, Zora taught me about how who I am and where I am as a writer influence me. Those things make me the way I am. They contribute to my beliefs and my character and my ideals. And there's no reason to shy away from them just because I'm telling a story. Let them flow. Chase the things I believe in and trust the story to find others who believe in them too. 

Ray Bradbury

I can write whatever the hell I want. That's the lesson I learned from Ray Bradbury. 

Do I want to write a collection of science fiction stories? Then do it. Do I want to write a mosaic novel about growing up in a small town? Then do it. Or maybe a sci-fi pseudo-novel told in short stories? Go ahead. Time's a wastin'. How 'bout a horror novel? Sure. Go right ahead. 

Don't let the machine pigeonhole you. Pay no attention to the genre markers that tell you "Thou shalt not pass." The whole of the world of storytelling is your plaything. 

There are no areas of the map you can't travel to. And there's nothing the machine or the marketing department can do to stop you. 

[Link] Stepping Into Raymond Chandler’s Shoes Showed Me the Power of Fiction

by Denise Mina

“The Second Murderer” is the first Philip Marlowe book written by a woman. Me.

Marlowe is, of course, the most famous creation of Raymond Chandler, perhaps the most famous of American crime novelists. Reading Chandler was always a guilty pleasure of mine, his vision of 1930s Los Angeles unfolding vividly for me all the way in cold and rainy Glasgow. On the one hand, there is his glorious writing, his blue-collar heroes and the occasional profound observations about the human experience. But there’s also his liberal use of racial slurs, his portrayal of people of color and homosexuals as grotesque caricatures and the fact that his work is suffused with misogyny. It takes a strong stomach to read a story in which a woman needs a slap to calm her down.

Crime fiction was, and is, anti-feminist. That’s why I chose to write it in the first place.

Traditionally, women never had agency in crime fiction, and when I started out I wanted to try to shift the dial, casting in with a movement that already counted such lights as Sara Paretsky, Marcia Talley, Mary Wings and Val McDermid. The way I saw it, crime fiction was the new social novel, wrapped in a genre that already seemed to be reaching a wide audience of largely female readers.

The knock on commercial fiction is that it’s often written so quickly that it tends to simply mirror, for good or ill, the social mores of the time that produced it. Chandler may have been a misogynist, but he definitely lived in misogynist times, and his fiction reflects that. When values change or views become more enlightened, these kind of books tend to age poorly. Sometimes this aging-out happens quite suddenly: How tired the endless copaganda procedurals seem now; how tone-deaf the books that end with the police justifiably shooting a suspect to death. The tsunami of books featuring women with faulty memories cannot be read in the same way since the #MeToo movement or in the context of changing attitudes about sexual violence and child abuse. Overnight, yesterday’s resilient trope seems hopelessly offensive, even dangerous.

Read the full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/opinion/raymond-chandler-philip-marlowe-denise-mina.html

Not Fitting in at the Bookstore -- And What It Taught Me About Who I Am as a Writer

I love used bookstores. Most of my ever-growing library comes either from online discounters or used bookstores. Even so, with all that love (I can spend hours wandering in a single, skinny store in a low-rent shopping center), I still always have the hardest time at used bookstores. The stuff I'm looking for to fill in gaps in my collections... Well, I never know where to look for it.

Is Vonnegut going to be with the sci-fi books or with classics? Sure, I can find Heinlein with sci-fi, but not so much Bradbury. He might be in with literary collections or classics, but seldom sci-fi, even though that was his bread and butter.

And let's talk about more contemporary writers like Gaiman. The man writes the heck out of fantasy, but good luck finding his books anywhere other than general fiction or literary.

And when I'm trying to fill in Hammett and Chandler, do I look under mysteries with Sue Grafton, et al, or do I hope for the best in classics, or just go straight to the desk and ask for the rare book room even though I'm not looking for the pricey versions, just beat-up paperback reprints?

Does anybody else have this problem?

I posted these words the other day on my social media feeds mainly just venting after going to visit a new used bookstore (Did I mention how much I love used bookstores yet? Because I really do. I can spend hours there in spite of my issue mentioned above.)

Only the idea wormed its way into my brain and grabbed hold of my thoughts and wouldn't let go. And it got me thinking about how that same issue related to who I am as a writer. Sure, I write genres, from action and adventure to sci-fi and horror (but no epic fantasy, sorry, not my bag), but I've never felt defined by those genres any more than I have by my content. And trust me, my content has varied from super heroes to monsters to hard-boiled gumshoes to planetary adventurers.

What Publishers Want

Publishers and readers look for categories, and not just any categories, but easy to define divisions. Those are easy to sell. A reader wants a mystery for the beach this summer, and bang, a clerk can walk said reader to the mystery section where he or she can be inundated by racks and racks of books by pretty much the same 100 authors. A reader wants a new urban fantasy, and poof, there’s a section for that, not to be confused with either sci-fi or mystery, or even epic fantasy. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s basic marketing.

It gets even quicker, easier, and more marketable with series. Publishers love series. Readers love series. Both love them because it means they don’t have to think about what to read next. They don’t have to experiment with authors outside their “I know and love him or her” list unless it’s a strong recommendation by a friend. Series make money for that very reason. Series make careers for that very reason. And smart writers (unlike me) know how to take advantage of that market for series books.

You see, I have learned that the publishing world is a lot like that used bookstore I love to visit. It continues to work because it is built on categories that make people’s choices for them. If you like ___________ then you’ll also like ___________. Don’t feel bad if there’s not a new book by ___________ yet, just read this similar book by ___________ and you’ll be fine.

The Spanner in the Works

I can’t write like that. Hell, I can’t even read like that. I love the authors I love because their works are so vastly different from each another. There are worlds between Bradbury's Dandelion Wine and R is for Rocket. Vonnegut only wrote one Player Piano, only one Sirens of Titan, and both of those are on the other side of Crazytown from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Slaughterhouse Five. Even Heinlein, while staying firmly inside the structure and settings of sci-fi, ranged from one end to the other with his diverse styles than covered the gamut from Starship Troopers to Job to For Us the Living to Stranger in a Stange Land and I Will Fear No Evil. I’ll have to acquiesce to the standard with Hammett and Chandler, but even those two diverged from their “series” from time to time.

I grew up on this kind of writing. Of the novels I’ve read, very few are parts of series. And even fewer fit easily into one genre. Most overlap between genres like the choreography of a Three Musketeers sword fight overlaps settings. One foot here in the foyer, then here in the dining room, then a hop to the stairwell and a step into the ballroom for another strike. 

The stuff I’ve always enjoyed most doesn’t fit into easy categories or series. At best, Kilgore Trout shows up in a few of Vonnegut’s novels, but not as the main character except in one. Even The Martian Chronicles isn’t a complete novel, but a series of related short stories with differing protagonists. Gaiman’s Sandman comics are the only true series work he’s done. The rest interrelate only in the trappings and table dressings, much like those of Stephen King’s fictional city of Derry.

Nor do I want to write like that. I want to paint with all the colors of the wind (thank you, Pocahontas!). I want to master all of the Lantern rings, from green to black. I want to write like the writers who influenced me, not because I want to be a clone of them, but because they created the same kinds of stories I want to be able to tell... a little bit of whatever the hell they wanted to tell at the time. They didn't get locked into markets, and even if that's the way the industry works today, I won't do it. I can't do it. It'd be like putting a part of me in a box and shoving it under the bed or in the top of the closet to ignore.

Maybe the business doesn't work the same way it did for them anymore, but it doesn't change who I am, who they helped make me as a creator of stories.

Outside the Genre Lines

I pity the reader looking for my stuff in a bookstore setup. It’s not as easy as going to the fantasy section and seeing a huge row of similar works all by George R.R. Martin (and not just because I’m not that popular). Nor can you waltz to the sci-fi section and find all my books together like Heinlein’s or Frank Herbert’s.

No. You have to go to the action section, the horror section, and sci-fi section, etc. and find maybe one each in these genre classifications. Because I love to write everything. I cherish that freedom. I think if I had to get stuck in a single genre because I was writing a successful series and having to revisit all the same characters over and over again, I’d be miserable as a writer. Sure, I might be a lot more successful and maybe even have more money if I pulled a Sue Grafton or a Craig Johnson. But, at best, I might be able to do a Walter Mosley and have to finish a series to start another when I felt it had run its course (I miss you, Easy.) But most likely, even that is beyond me, and I’ll continue to jump around in obscurity from monsters to private dicks with all the wild abandon of a child coloring outside the lines in his first “I Went to the Zoo” coloring book.

If I had to single it out, I think the one thing that defines me as a writer would be voice. It’s the “who I am” as a writer that links my books and stories together. There’s a way I tell stories that comes across (at least I hope) to let you know you’re reading works by the same author.

A caveat: At no point to I intend to slight the work of series or genre-specific writers as a lesser quality or more low-brow kind of writing. If anything, it’s a lot smarter than what I’m doing. It’s just not what I’m created to write. I’ve got a wandering spirit that resists today’s “rules” of marketing. There’s still enough Hemingway and Carver and Fitzgerald in me to screw up the “what I’m supposed to do” of genre writing and convince me that I can do it all.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference,” wrote Robert Frost, and I think I finally understand how his way-over-quoted poem relates to my writing life. It means that when faced with the options of doing things the easier, more profitable, more marketable, industry-standard way, I dug in my heels, became obstinate, stuck to my guns, and walked clearly and steadfastly in the other direction.

And I’m cool with that.

Well, I never said I was smart.

Ideas Like Bullets -- I Oughta Be Committed

One of the things that comes with being a writer, well, to be honest, being a creative in any sense of the word, is the concept of assumption.  A sibling to that is of course expectation.  Now, I am not speaking of assumptions and expectations a writer may have, that’s a whole other column, but I am referring to assumptions made by and expectations of people who aren’t authors.  You know them, almost everyone else in the world, how it feels anyway, who are sort of on the outside of what we do looking in.  Those people who, when they learn what you do, have a range of physical reactions, anything from eyes widening like saucers as they ask, “Do you know Stephen King?” to the furrowed brow and disgruntled frown as they ask, “So, you live in your mother’s basement, then?”

Of course, we as writers react to these in different ways and that’s all right. We should, as we are all individuals.  It makes sense that people who aren’t authors have a preconceived notion.  Again, that’s a human thing, we do that with any career, any religion, anybody that is slightly ‘something else’, we ask questions or react to them based on the ‘stereotype’ fixed in our brains, usually.  And after the initial reaction usually comes questions.  Not just silly ones like “So You’re rich, right?”, but questions about how we write, what it takes to be a writer, those sorts of things. 

That is where I will venture today. 

I’ve got a lot of thoughts on many things.  Now, the fact that I am a writer and a publisher and somebody who does Genre Fiction and New Pulp adds no extra weight really to my opinions or advice, so I won’t take offense if you don’t print off this blog post and carry it close to your heart to treasure it always.  And my missives where writing are concerned are most definitely my own personal deductions on the craft and my views on the mechanics of how things work, all points you are perfectly allowed to ignore or even actively disagree with. 

Some of what follows will be the aforementioned advice.  Some will be simply answers to questions often asked.  Much of it will be my take on certain conventions, some of those aforementioned assumptions and expectations, and even things writer believe and feel.  All in all, just my musings, so be forewarned and take them for what you feel they’re worth.

One of the most common questions asked by anyone who has even an inkling of real curiosity about what authors do is, “Well, how do You become a writer?”  Another version of this one is “What do you to be a writer?”  And as silly as these questions may sound when you read them aloud, they’re not bad starting points.  The answer I give is actually rather simple and one that many, many of the writers I know and a lot I don’t know use as well.

Writers write.

That’s it, short and simple. Now, if you want my shade and coloring of that answer, writers write every day.  And by that I mean, someone interested in being an author, be it fiction or nonfiction, writing newspaper articles about Sunday brunches or earth shattering exposes on red dye food coloring and its effect on the sparrow population, must commit their craft consistently. 

Now, notice that last sentence.  Normally when someone says the above, the word they will use is ‘practice’… ‘must practice their craft consistently.’  Obviously, I am teetering on the edge of semantics, but that’s okay.  I simply don’t believe that ‘practice’ is the best word.  Although it can be defined as the doing of one’s occupation or the applying of one’s skill, I don’t like the fact that it sounds like a writer is still in the infancy of what they’re doing.  Moreso, I don’t believe that it’s a strong enough word.  That’s why I don’t practice writing. I commit writing, every single day.  I make it happen, I follow through, I get it done. Even if it is a single sentence furthering a project or maybe even a few lines putting a new idea on paper, I do it every day to some degree.  Sometimes it’s clean and precise and sometimes it’s messy and all over the place, but I do it on a daily basis.  Commit may seem too strong a word, and has connotations that some may not like, making writing sound like a crime, but what I do as an author, while not criminal (at least in my opinion, I probably have some readers who would disagree), is something I take very seriously and do with the greatest of intent. So, yes, writers should commit writing every single day.

The follow up question to the above that usually comes from those who are considering actually trying to write involves exactly what to write.  Again, my thoughts on this share similarities with the ideas of others, but that’s okay. It’s nice to know that not all my opinions are on the outer edges of conventional thinking.
There’s an age old adage that writers should write what they know.  Although a logical argument can be made for this, let me present just one of many examples right out of the gate that will blow this concept away. 

There was a man in the 1930s who had a job.  His job was working as an executive working for an oil company. He did what ever oil company executives do, I suppose, until something happened that cost him his job. This same something cost many people their jobs, their homes, their livelihoods and, even in some instances, their lives.  That would be the Great Depression.

When this particular man lost his job, he of course began looking for other ways to make the scratch necessary to live.  So, he turned to writing. Not just any writing, but writing for the Pulps. Writing mysteries. And not just any mysteries, but tales featuring Private Investigators, and other such types. And not just any Private Eye either. This man, this former oil executive whose job had been doing oil executive things, created Phillip Marlowe, one of the most recognized characters in fiction today.  Raymond Chandler was this man and he didn’t write what he knew.  He wrote what he wanted to.

Now, it can be argued that Chandler wrote what would sell, and that’s a true statement.   But I’ll hold that he wanted to write what would sell, so he wrote what he wanted to.  In today’s market, there are opportunities to write just about anything.  If you want to be a professional writer and that be all you do full time, there are ways to make that happen.  I know people who do it and don’t mind it, some who absolutely love it.  But many of them do it by not necessarily writing things they enjoy, but instead by authoring technical manuals or writing ad copy for websites.  Yes, it’s writing, and yes, they want to write it because they want to get paid for it.  But I have to take it a step further to offer advice. 

Write…what you like. 

If you like space opera, write space opera.  That means doing as much research as you need to to write intelligently about it, but do that and then WRITE it.  If Westerns are your thing, then dust off your hat and saddle up and WRITE a Western.  Write what you like and find a market for it, if authoring is something you want to turn into a career.  Or, if that’s the case, look at what people are paying for writers to write and find something in that You like and WRITE it.  In one sense, writing is like any other job.  It takes far too much time and work and commitment to be a writer for you to spend hours and days and years writing things you would never read, putting down words you can’t stand.  So…write what you like.

Life’s too short not to.

[Link] Pulp Fiction: What’s It All About?

by Paul Bishop

I WAS ASKED the other day to explain what makes pulp storytelling different from other types of fiction. My kneejerk reaction was to claim, it’s hard to define, but I know it when I read it – which does little to answer the question. I’ve since thought a lot about what constitutes the pulp style of storytelling, which engenders both excoriating scorn from critics and fanatical devotion from acolytes.

By now, most readers know the term pulp was coined in reference to the thousands of inexpensive fiction magazines whose heyday spanned the 1920s through the 1950s. Printed on cheap wood pulp paper, the pulps were typically 7 inches by 10 inches in size, 128 pages long, and sported eye grabbing, luridly colored covers, and ragged, untrimmed edges. Today, the original pulps are more often collected for their gaudy covers than for the fluctuating quality of the words in between.

At the height of their popularity there were hundreds of pulp magazine titles gracing the newsstands each week. The demand for stories was as voracious as the pay per word was cheap. To make a living, a writer selling stories to the pulps had to be a word machine, churning out prose for a quarter to a half cent per word. The result of this constant demand was a straightforward, often formulatic, style of writing designed to entertain a vast audience of everyday, hardworking, folks looking for vicarious thrills and chills to escape the humdrum of their daily lives.

The pulps were also a refiner’s fire for many writers who are household names today – Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Louis L’Amour, John D. MacDonald, and others. To these men belonged the battered typewriters and hard drinking tropes, which themselves have become a cliché within the public conscious.

There were also giants of the pulp writing field whose names are not as familiar, but whose characters have gone on to become iconic examples of pop culture – Robert E. Howard’s Conan The Barbarian, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, Walter B. Gibson’s The Shadow, Lester Dent’s Doc Savage, to name just a few, all started in the pulps. We all know their famous creations, but most would look blank if asked who the creators were.

The downside of the insatiable demand for stories to fill the pages of pulp magazines was it also guaranteed much of what was published was slapdash gruel of little to no lasting impact. It is this explosion of dross that gives pulp dismissing critics a place to hang their clichéd hats. However, the beating heart of the true pulps – the best of the stories and characters born within their pages – has shined for almost a century of popular culture.

Read the full article: http://venturegalleries.com/blog/pulp-fiction-whats/

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now #303 -- World Building in Action Stories

How important is world building to an adventure story?

World building means different things to different writers, I believe. To me, it means simply creating a believable setting in which a story can take place. In that sense, world building is paramount, crucial, and a story can only suffer in its absence.

However, applying world building to an adventure story must follow different rules from the ones established in turn of the century literature or epic fantasy, I think. In those kinds of stories, readers are often looking for a more verbose sense of writing style or a "grander" way to telling and/or showing the tale. But in adventure writing, readers don't want a lot of description of place and the symbolism of a particular color of curtains to get in the way of the more quickly moving action.

But, the little details you choose as a writer can and will make the setting more real, and should. If a setting feels generic, I know that I've failed as a writer. A reader almost needs to be able to smell the smoke from the Jazz club or feel the desolate rocky surfaces of the lost valley in order to really emote during reading.

Perhaps three of the best examples of setting made real through details are:

1. Philip Marlowe's Los Angeles. Sure, it's a real place already, but it feels more real when Chandler writes it.
2. Gotham City. I'm convinced that place is completely real. It HAS to be. 
3. Opal City from the pages of James Robinson's Starman series -- masterfully skilled world building in that one. Jack Knight wouldn't be Jack Knight if he lived any other place.

[Link] Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder"(1950)

Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic. Old-fashioned novels which now seem stilted and artificial to the point of burlesque did not appear that way to the people who first read them. Writers like Fielding and Smollett could seem realistic in the modern sense because they dealt largely with uninhibited characters, many of whom were about two jumps ahead of the police, but Jane Austen’s chronicles of highly inhibited people against a background of rural gentility seem real enough psychologically. There is plenty of that kind of social and emotional hypocrisy around today. Add to it a liberal dose of intellectual pretentiousness and you get the tone of the book page in your daily paper and the earnest and fatuous atmosphere breathed by discussion groups in little clubs. These are the people who make bestsellers, which are promotional jobs based on a sort of indirect snob-appeal, carefully escorted by the trained seals of the critical fraternity, and lovingly tended and watered by certain much too powerful pressure groups whose business is selling books, although they would like you to think they are fostering culture. Just get a little behind in your payments and you will find out how idealistic they are.

The detective story for a variety of reasons can seldom be promoted. It is usually about murder and hence lacks the element of uplift. Murder, which is a frustration of the individual and hence a frustration of the race, may have, and in fact has, a good deal of sociological implication. But it has been going on too long for it to be news. If the mystery novel is at all realistic (which it very seldom is) it is written in a certain spirit of detachment; otherwise nobody but a psychopath would want to write it or read it. The murder novel has also a depressing way of minding its own business, solving its own problems and answering its own questions. There is nothing left to discuss, except whether it was well enough written to be good fiction, and the people who make up the half-million sales wouldn’t know that anyway. The detection of quality in writing is difficult enough even for those who make a career of the job, without paying too much attention to the matter of advance sales.

The detective story (perhaps I had better call it that, since the English formula still dominates the trade) has to find its public by a slow process of distillation. That it does do this, and holds on thereafter with such tenacity, is a fact; the reasons for it are a study for more patient minds than mine. Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount; it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.

Yet the detective story, even in its most conventional form, is difficult to write well.

Continue reading: http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/chandlerart.html

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now (#152) -- Mystery Stories

Since you write the adventures of a pulp detective, what's your favorite and least favorite kind of mystery story?

I love a good mystery story, but, that said, I really am not at all fond of what's called a "cozy" mystery. What's a cozy? Mrs. Marple and her ilk. Sweet little old ladies or polite Belgium gentlemen who solve bloodless mysteries without ever really having to face genuine danger along their path to finding the killer. They seem more an exercise in intelligence (like a puzzle) than in action or crime-stopping.

What I really enjoy reading when I want a mystery is either a good police procedural like the amazing 87th Precinct books by Ed McBain or something pulpy and gritty (noir-ish) like the Raymond Chandler private eye tales and the ones being published by Hard Case Crime. In both of these types, not only do we get the inside scoop on the brains of the poor saps stuck with solving the crimes, but also that immediate sense of danger and life-threatening risk along with some mud to wallow through along the way.

For the record, I also enjoy some of the supernatural detective fiction as well, particularly Jim Butcher's Dresden books and Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan series.