Book Reviews
Did Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett hate Agatha Christie?
Everybody knows Agatha Christie. Do you suppose old ladies in England habitually walk around drinking tea and saying, "Oh no, my dear. She wasn't sleeping; she'd been poisoned. I noticed that the first time I entered the patio. You see, the geraniums had been put on the left side of the door. And she never puts flowers on the left. That's where she puts her newspaper and tea cup. Well, when I saw that, I knew that she'd been murdered, you see."
They don't! My old ma loves tea, geraniums, newspapers, and she lives in the country, and she hasn't solved a single murder in all of her seventy six years on earth, not one. It just doesn't happen like that, not even if you've got thatched-roof cottages, the local bobby, a nice green lawn in the front of the village, a church with a vicar and lots of gossipy neighbours who all hate each other for no apparent reason, it still doesn't happen like that! I'm sorry to rain on your tea-party, but it's all poppycock, I'm afraid, every last page of it. Sorry! Now that's where Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler come into the picture. They'd read Miss Marple too. Well, at least Raymond had, and he threw up all over his nice, clean, American suit.
Raymond Chandler didn't just hate Agatha Christie. He hated all of the British crime writers. "If the writers of this fiction wrote about the kind of murders that happen they would also have to write about the authentic flavor of life as it is lived," Chandler once complained. Mind you, back in the Twenties, the Brits had all joined this club called The Detection Club, and they had all signed up to a code of rules written by a vicar called the Right Reverend Ronald Knox! I swear it's true, every word of it! The British crime writers were sticking to a bunch of guidelines written by a parish vicar! No wonder their stories were a bunch of crock! I mean what sort of crimes do you think would fit into the imagination of a vicar? For Heaven's sake! Well, you've guessed it, little old ladies falling down stairs after drinking too much tea.
And, at about the same time that Raymond Chandler was buying himself a new outfit and getting rid of the one he'd soiled on account of reading too much Christie, Dashiell, on the other hand, must have decided to pull out a typewriter and write some mystery stories properly. Out go the English villages, the bobbies, the tea and the poison. In fact, out goes everything. And in come fast cars, men with guns, double-crossing, cursing, or cussing, as the Yanks call it. Hoodlums, dagoes, micks, cudgels, pieces, blood, whacking, bribery, corruption, dames, broads, bent chiefs of police, in fact you name it, it's in. Oh, and Britain's out and America is in. And violence! With Hammett and Chandler you get all the violence you can eat, for only one Dollar.
Now, you must understand, Dashiell wasn't just writing about the cracking of skulls for the hell of it! Oh no. If you read the letters that he wrote to his editor, he argues about literary style, criminology, policework, detective-work and latent-proto-police- forensics, all the way to the printing press! No, Dashiell was obsessive, alright, about what his stories contained. They just happened to contain a whole bunch of death and destruction!
And Dashiell was also an expert mystery book reviewer! He wrote mystery book reviews for both the Saturday Review of Literature and the NewYork Evening Post. In truth, Agatha Christie was reviewed, (often favourably,) by the Saturday Review, but not by Hammett, as far as I know. So I haven't, yet, managed to find out precisely what Dashiell Hammett genuinely thought of Christie's work! But I have both seen and read that he was normally pretty darn horrible about everybody elses work! So I don't hold out any real hope for Agatha in Dashiell's eyes. But there is always room for a surprise, even in the cynical and jaded world of crime writing! (Well, I hope so, anyway.)
But, one last thing before I go! According to Dashiell Hammett you can forget about Ronald Knox's rules for mystery writing! Hammett wrote his book reviews before the British Detection Club had even been invented, so Ronald Knox hadn't written his fiction writers' rules by then! But Dashiell Hammett already knew about yet another set of rules which had come from the International Detective Story Writers' Convention in Geneva back in 1904! It seems as though mystery writers have been writing group-rules for over a hundred years! Hammett , it seems, wasn't phased by these rules either, (unlike Raymond Chandler.) And Hammett even reckoned that one particular writer had been using the Geneva Mystery Rules for so long that she ought to have gotten good at writing novels by then, but she hadn't!
So, did Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler both hate Agatha Christie? Well, we know that Raymond Chandler did. So, there's no point in beating about the bush on that score. But, in respect of how Dashiell Hammett felt about the ouber-popular woman mystery writer, well, fittingly, at the moment, it's still a mystery!
Editorial July 2008
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