Closing the year out with one more hard-boiled volume, it's Raymond Chandler's The Simple Art Of Murder -- a collection of eight short stories from the 1930s, plus the title essay, which originally ran in Atlantic Monthly, circa 1944. These pulp shorts are good, and recognizably Chandler, but swing nowhere near the weight of the Marlowe novels. And though there's a lot of drinking throughout, they have barely a hint of the intoxicating prose stylization of the novels. Still, they predate the Marlowe era, and could probably be considered tuneups for what was to come, from the proto-Ellroy Pickup On Noon Street, with its good-cop/bad-cop in one protagonist, to the comical Pearls Are A Nuisance, with a first person narrator who's just a darned bit too silly. Then there's The Simple Art Of Murder, an analysis of the detective story, pre and post-hardboiling. It's fine, somewhat like listening to Ricky Jay speak about the nuts and bolts of magic.
Posted by M.Ace at 04:33 PM, December 30, 2004.