The Masters and the Masses

While looking for something else entirely (and isn’t that the way many great discoveries are made?), I happened upon a couple of older stories in Salon that are well worth re-reading, but that appeared before The Rap Sheet took wing.

The first comes from 2002 and was penned by Allen Barra, a former Wall Street Journal sports columnist and the author of that fine cultural biography Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends. Entitled “The Case for Raymond Chandler,” it argues well that, although Chandler often overcomplicated his plots and oversimplified the ultimate presentation of their solutions, he gave us atmospherics and a genre style that were irreproducible, if not susceptible to imitation. Writes Barra:

What matters is not how Chandler was similar to [Dashiell] Hammett, or, more important, to the now-forgotten hacks of the 1930s pulps, but how he was different. His prose, for instance--the tight, swift rhythm and sentences that careen toward the end of paragraphs with a closer that stings like a slap in the face. Hacks don’t write with Chandler’s kind of precision. That’s why they are hacks. Chandler’s prose was the perfect vehicle for the suspense story that he more than anyone else perfected if not actually invented--the kind driven more by atmosphere and the baser side of human nature than by plot.

Which is why, in the end, most of Chandler’s critics tend to be either wrong or irrelevant. About 10 years ago, Martin Amis, in the New York Times, wittily dismissed Chandler as dated, and on a superficial level he was probably right. But if that really mattered, why would Chandler continue to be read more than 60 years after his first book? We shall see if Mr. Amis dates so well in a fraction of that time. (One might note that the memory of Amis’ own 1997 attempt at a mystery, “Night
Train,” didn’t survive the year it was written.) Chandler’s finest biographer, Tom Hiney, put it best: “Since the 1940s, so many crime writers have emulated Chandler’s style that Marlowe has been something of a cliché outside of his original stories. Within them, he has lost almost nothing at all.”

The second piece, which generated considerable and often condemnatory responses in January 2004, was the similarly titled “The Case of the Overrated Mystery Novel.” It was the work of Ben Yagoda, a former Philadelphia Magazine writer and Will Rogers biographer. In it, Yagoda praises Chandler and his most-skilled early successor, Ross Macdonald, but then goes on to denounce more recent crime fiction--especially those that involve continuing protagonists--as pale by comparison.

The problem, I came to realize, is that all detective series seem to require two items that run counter to literary values and that, no matter what the author’s skills (clean prose, social or psychological observation, plot construction), will artistically doom it. The first is the main character, who is invariably romanticized or sentimentalized and who is always a combination of three not especially interesting things: toughness, efficacy and sensitivity. (When the writer resists applying any or all of these traits, the character ends up being bland.) The second is the very formulaic quality that lets a book be part of a series. Similar things happen in similar ways, which is probably as apt a definition as you’ll ever find of how not to make good literature. Chandler--not to mention Arthur Conan Doyle--got away with it because he was a genius and an original, Macdonald because he was gifted and started early in the day. Their successors have no such luck.

Yagoda, though I have admired much of his work, strikes me as a dilettante crime-fiction reader, guilty of a critic’s inclination to denounce for the sake of attention. On the other hand, he’s right in suggesting that today’s novelists too often feed off one another, repeating mistakes and echoing a certain shallowness of dialogue, and being willing to accept a lower standard of prose and plotting than some of the folks who bequeathed this genre to them. Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald probably benefited from writing in an environment where there were far fewer ambitious crime novelists and a consequent tendency, when borrowing from their fellows, to look to those occupying the larger pool of literary stylists. Rare excellence, in other words, leads to wider excellence; while excess merely breeds excess.

Obviously, I have a tremendous love of this genre, and one day hope to join it as a novelist, rather than simply as a critic; but I do agree that popularity for the genre has not been all too the good. Many mediocre books have been published merely to fill the public’s appetite for more (though I would not call either of the books Yagoda snarls at in his essay--Michael Connelly’s City of Bones and S.J. Rozan’s Winter and Night--examples of the lowest common denominator). We can only hope that some of today’s ridiculous excesses and copycat-ism can be pared away in the future. The genre as a whole would benefit.