Raymond Chandler: The Crime Writer Who Made Poetry Out Of Pulp

Andrew M Brown at the British newspaper the Telegraph wrote an interesting piece about one of my favorite writers, Raymond Chandler, and a new book on Chandler by Tom Williams.

Crime writers have always had an inferiority complex about their work. It goes back to Conan Doyle, who thought his historical novels were better than the Sherlock Holmes stories. Ian Rankin was reflecting (on Twitter) the other day about the low status of crime fiction. And at the recent Crime Writers’ Association awards, authors were heard grumbling that the literary establishment looked down on the mystery genre.

But a novel written under genre constraints can be a work of literature, and one writer did more than any other to make detective fiction respectable: Raymond Chandler, the subject of a thorough new biography by Tom Williams. Chandler took violent pulp fiction and transformed it.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9408853/Raymond-Chandler-the-crime-writer-who-made-poetry-out-of-pulp.html