The Simple Art of Murder (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Chandler is not only the best writer of hardboiled PI stories, he's one of the 20th century's top scribes, period. His full canon of novels and short stories is reprinted in trade paper featuring uniform covers in Black Lizard's signature style. A handsome set for a reasonable price.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Raymond Chandler is a master." --The New York Times

?[Chandler] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered.? --The New Yorker

?Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious.? --Robert B. Parker, The New York Times Book Review

?Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye.? --Los Angeles Times

?Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . . An original. . . . A great artist.? ?The Boston Book Review

?Raymond Chandler was one of the finest prose writers of the twentieth century. . . . Age does not wither Chandler?s prose. . . . He wrote like an angel.? --Literary Review

?[T]he prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision.? --Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

?Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.? ?Ross Macdonald

?Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude.? --Erle Stanley Gardner

?Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.? --Paul Auster

?[Chandler]?s the perfect novelist for our times. He takes us into a different world, a world that?s like ours, but isn?t. ? --Carolyn See

-- Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (September 12, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394757653
• ISBN-13: 978-0394757650
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #31,382 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Art made to look simple, November 12, 1998

By A Customer

The essay which gives this collection its title is the apotheosis of Chandler - the absolute distillation of the meaning of "Chandleresque" (or for that matter "Hammett-ness"). Here Chandler steps back from the creation of Noir fiction and, in a sometimes bitter or shrp way, comes down hard on the Hams and Part-timers of a literary form he believed to be worthy of elevation from the term genre.

Chandler chose to use the conventions of the Crime Novella format to his own - rather than any readership or editors - ends. Less monothematic than the given Short Story format, pre-flavoured with the expectations of the Crime buyer, the Novella and its narrow context of the stark contrasts of the Urban existence allow Chandler to define a notion of modern man and the modern morality of the individual in a socially dislocated environment - years before Welles and decades ahead of the Quention Tarantino's who currently tease us with the same issues and questions.

In "The Simple Art of Murder" the short stories and mini-novellas are sharp and compelling; in the title-giving essay, Chandler sits back and confesses to what compels him to write so. To paraphrase the author himself (speaking of Hammett for whom he had a great admiration), he took the art of murder from the counttry vicarage and "gave it back to the people on the street, to whom it really belonged anyway". Marlowe is silhouetted by his creator in his concluding idea of why a man such as him will always exist, why his morality must exist .. "down these mean streets a man must go, a man who is neither tarnished nor afraid...". Written with so much conviction that his argument stands up like a spoon in it, for this essay alone - and the future years of musing on and quoting whole tracts that will instantly lodge in your memory for ever - no-one interested in what underlies the fascination of "noir" should go down a dark alley at night without it.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Pulp Fiction" at its very best, July 1, 2002

By	Neal C. Reynolds (Indianapolis, Indiana) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Those years of the 30's gave us the incredible "pulp" magazines of several genres, basically adventure, western, science fiction, mystery and detective. The detective pulps such as "Black Mask" and "Dime Detective" were training grounds for the like of Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler.

This volume gives us Raymond Chandler's essay of the detective genre plus twelve novellas and short stories basically from the pulp magazines.

Four of these are Phillip Marlowe adventures, all written before the novels. Of these, "Goldfish" and "Trouble is My Business" truly stand out. However, there are three others: "Smart-Aleck Kill" with Johnny Dalmas, the notable "Guns at Cyrano's" with Ted Carmady, and "The King in Yellow" featuring hotel detective turned private eye Steve Grayce. Each of these three stories feature a very obvious antecedent to Phillip Marlowe.

Raymond Chandler is noted especially for his concise but rich descriptions of locale and also of characters. These are practically photographic descriptions. Also, there's Chandler's dialogue complete with sardonic humor and wisecracks. The plot is swift paced with nary a dull moment. He was well trained by BLACK MASK's editor who suggested that whenever the plot threatens to bog down, have a man with a gun in his hand walk into the scene.

Dashell Hammett and Raymond Chandler shaped the tough private eye genre which spawned Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, Richard Prather's Shell Scott, Robert Parker's Spenser, and also today's police detective genre, most notably Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch.

Chandler termed this genre, as opposed to the more genteel Agatha Christy type of mystery, "realistic". Well, that's arguable. I don't know about you, but I don't ordinarily find dead bodies whenever I walk into an empty room, nor are the people who knock on my door likely to have guns in their hands, or even on their persons, so I question the "realistic" label. But these stories are good fun. The body count is rather high in most of the stories, and you can often figure out who the murderer is by eliminating the characters who get killed along the way.

Be that as it may, this volume is indeed highly recommended.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Short stories from the creator of Phillip Marlowe., December 2, 1996

By A Customer

Raymond Chander fans who associate the author's name only with that of his famous creation, Phillip Marlowe, will enjoy "The Simple Art Of Murder," a collection of Chandler stories originally published in everything from "Dime Detective" magazine to "The Saturday Evening Post." These stories, in which Marlowe as we know him is nowhere to be found, trace the evolution of Chandler's distinctive style and find him experimenting with various characters and points of view. Several stories feature third-person narration, contrary to the Marlowe novels' first-person perspective, and many stories feature protagonists who are obviously Marlowe prototypes. Naturally, all of the tales feature Chandler's poetic dialogue, remarkable descriptions, and enjoyably tangled plots. Highlights of the collection include "The Simple Art of Murder," an essay by the author on the nature of mystery-writing, and the haunting "I'll Be Waiting," in which a lonely hotel detective tries to help a beautiful guest and ends up paying a dearer price than he could ever have imagined. My personal favorite among the stories is the surprisingly funny "Pearls Are A Nuisance," which proves that Chandler really did have a sense of humor. Anyone looking for a fresh perspective on one of mystery's best writers should pick up "The Simple Art Of Murder."