The simple art of murder
The Simple Art of Murder is the title of several quasi-connected publications by hard-boiled detective fiction author Raymond Chandler:The first, and arguably best-known, is a critical essay on detective fiction, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1944. A revised, expanded version was included in Howard Haycraft's 1946 anthology The Art of the Mystery Story. The second is a separate, shorter essay, mostly describing Chandler's personal experiences writing for pulp magazines, originally published in Saturday Review of Literature, April 15, 1950. The third is a short story collection, also originally published in 1950, which contains a number of Chandler's pulp detective stories pre-dating his first novel The Big Sleep. While first editions of this collection feature an abridgement of the Saturday essay as an introduction and the Atlantic essay as an afterword, later editions tend to feature the Atlantic essay as the introduction and relegate the Saturday essay to other collections, most commonly Trouble Is My Business. The exact number of stories collected vary: while the original American hardcover included twelve, many later editions include only eight, and some paperback editions comprise as few as four.
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What Hacker News says
- Also worth reading in this genre is Raymond Chandler’s The Simple Art of Murder:
- I'd recommend starting with some of his collections of short stories, like 'The Simple Art of Murder' - https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20140930 or 'Trouble is My Business' - https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20150520
- > There doesn't seem to be a lot of fiction that features the Pinkertons prominently. One exception is the (excellent) HBO TV series Deadwood.
Also any of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op stories. The Contintental Detective Agency is the Pinkertons with the serial numbers filed off. Hammett himself worked as a Pinkerton, among other things, before he got into writing.
I got into his writing because Raymond Chandler was such a big fan as I learned from his essay The Simple Art of Murder[1]
- Related:
Ian Fleming Explains How to Write a Thriller (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25181256 - Nov 2020 (18 comments)
and for that matter, here's Raymond Chandler explaining how to write a murder - from yesterday:
The Simple Art of Murder (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33888453 - Dec 2022 (3 comments)
- Yes, but with so much material out there to read, it is good to have at least some vague indication of the worth of a work.
Also writers of crime fiction often have themselves question ed the worth of much of the production, see Raymond Chandler's Essay "The Simple Art of Murder'.
Why should we read Christie when we could rather read Graham Greene sounds like an interesting question to me
- Raymond Chandler's thoughts on the subject[1][2] make a nice contrast with this list. I haven't read any S.S. Van Dine, but in general I strongly prefer Chandler's approach over other mystery authors of the time.
[1]"Ten Commandments for the Detective Novel" http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/triv116.html
[2]"The Simple Art of Murder" http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/chandlerar...
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