The Simple Art Of Murder

The Simple Art of Murder is a 1950 work of crime fiction and literary criticism written by Raymond Chandler, an American-British screenwriter and novelist. Chandler is credited with enormous stylistic influence on the canon of mystery fiction, and this work is considered seminal to its genre. In it, Chandler both pays homage to and criticizes detective fiction, moving deftly between its different contributing historical and literary registers, including realism, surrealism, historicism, mystery, and suspense. The novel is comprised of short stories focusing on different aspects of the criminal world that Chandler was intimately familiar with, particularly in 1940s and 1950s Los Angeles. These stories cover everything from Los Angeles’s violent and media-industry-tied political underworld to instances of blackmail and murder.

In his opening remarks, Chandler grounds his novel with a few essential claims about fiction. For one, he holds that fiction’s goal has always been to become “real.” He elaborates that bad fiction is obviously unreal, relying on cognitive lapses such as an assumption of the reader’s ignorance or short attention span, the brushing over of detail, and deliberately unrealistic narrativization. Chandler then introduces a corollary to his first statement, claiming that if a work of literature is grounded in obvious falsehood, it does not even fit into the genre of the novel, since there is no real story for the novel to build on. Here, Chandler presents an interpretation of “realistic” that is distinct from the close synonym “factual,” viewing them as nonsynonymous.

Next, Chandler characterizes the police of his time as universally corrupt. Many of his characters expound on the archetypical policeman who takes bribes and becomes entangled in an urban web of crime. Chandler integrates this corrupt reality with the policeman’s development in the literary realm. He asserts that detective stories, at first, were generally viewed as inferior kinds of fiction, until the writer Dashiell Hammett injected the genre with realism and redefined the American mystery canon. Chandler seeks to extend this tradition: As a well-known mystery writer himself, he borrowed and elaborated on many of Hammett’s ideas during his career.



The stories in The Simple Art of Murder unfold according to a formula that Chandler describes in his essay about the criminal fiction genre. First, each story pivots around a central past crime; usually, this is a string of murders or disappearances that afford the detectives no recourse to the victims’ perspectives. Next, the agent of the crime is nearly always someone the protagonist already knows; fittingly, the protagonist is generally a detective figure (official or unofficial) who has a historical connection to the criminal underworld. The detective is also generally involved in a romance with a secondary character and also has a close friend or confidant who generally perishes in their attempt to help the protagonist find the culprit. In each story, deaths usually occur in a cascade, and the detective is a lone wolf in a sea of ineffective police officers who work in parallel and often complicate the case.

Next, Chandler elucidates the logic behind the police officer archetype in a murder mystery. Works of crime literature frequently involve rampant corruption. It follows that the victims of the murders only get justice after the independent acts of a detective figure, rather than through the justice system. The corruptions of the justice system are allayed by the detective figure’s ambiguous and flexible conception of right and wrong, which allows them to perceive truth that the system is unable to comprehend. The detective is also more successful than the police by virtue of their conception of the journey as a quest rather than a circular discourse. In this quest, the detective is able to view morally ambiguous characters without levying a binary judgment of “good” or “bad” favored by the justice system, and they remain adamant about helping those they perceive as innocent or victimized. The American flavor of crime fiction is distinct from British crime fiction because of its realism, including its discussion of real violence and real systemic problems in the justice system. British crime literature, Chandler concludes, has drifted away from the realism that comprises compelling and legitimate stories.

Chandler’s novel constructs a somewhat prohibitive theory of what makes crime fiction legitimate and has been refuted by many authors during and since his time. However, it represents a significant moment in the theory of an important American literary genre. Ultimately, Chandler does not dictate the genre’s future, but instead provides a template for the narrative structures that have survived and flourished so far, to which future works might be compared.