Editor's Note: This is perhaps the single finest essay on the art
of writing pulp detectives, and we're thrilled to have found it available
online. Enjoy! -- ST/BN
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. Good specimens of the art are much rarer than good serious
novels. Rather second-rate items outlast most of the high velocity
fiction, and a great many that should never have been born simply refuse
to die at all. They are as durable as the statues in public parks and
just about that dull. This is very annoying to people of what is called
discernment. They do not like it that penetrating and important works of
fiction of a few years back stand on their special shelf in the library
marked "Best-Sellers of Yesteryear," and nobody goes near them but an
occasional shortsighted customer who bends down, peers briefly and
hurries away; while old ladies jostle each other at the mystery shelf to
grab off some item of the same vintage with a title like The Triple
Petunia Murder Case, or Inspector Pinchbottle to the Rescue. They do not
like it that "really important books" get dusty on the reprint counter,
while Death Wears Yellow Garters is put out in editions of fifty or one
hundred thousand copies on the news-stands of the country, and is
obviously not there just to say goodbye.
Continue reading:
http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/chandlerart.html
