Raymond Chandler's 10 Rules for Murder Mysteries

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler is one of my favorite authors. I even wanted to buy a house he owned in La Jolla. I wanted to buy it, but I couldn’t afford it. In fact, I couldn’t afford the property tax on the house, which was over sixty thousand a year. I need to sell a lot more books before I get there. 

Beyond great novels and screenplays, Chandler wrote about Hollywood and writing. It would be an understatement to say he disliked English murder mysteries. Chandler liked realism, not puzzles. Here are his 10 rules of mystery writing. I tried to follow them in Murder at Thumb Butte, a murder mystery that just happens to occur in the Old West.

1. It must be credibly motivated, both as to the original situation and the dénouement.
2. It must be technically sound as to the methods of murder and detection.
3. It must be realistic in character, setting and atmosphere. It must be about real people in a real world.
4. It must have a sound story value apart from the mystery element: i.e., the investigation itself must be an adventure worth reading.
5. It must have enough essential simplicity to be explained easily when the time comes.
6. It must baffle a reasonably intelligent reader.
7. The solution must seem inevitable once revealed.
8. It must not try to do everything at once. If it is a puzzle story operating in a rather cool, reasonable atmosphere, it cannot also be a violent adventure or a passionate romance.
9. It must punish the criminal in one way or another, not necessarily by operation of the law…. If the detective fails to resolve the consequences of the crime, the story is an unresolved chord and leaves irritation behind it.
10. It must be honest with the reader.

Honest Westerns filled with dishonest characters.

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We can all learn from Shakespeare

Writer’s Digest did a piece titled, “10 Things Shakespeare Can Teach us About Writing Thrillers.” The ten tips actually help with any genre. Shakespeare was a great writer and a suburb storyteller. It’s the combination that makes him world renown nearly 400 years after his death. In his day, he was not a literary figure; he was the equivalent of a prime time screenwriter. Shakespeare wrote to fill theaters with paying audiences. (Somewhere around forty people depended on his plays for their livelihood.) 

Populist or Elitist?

One of my favorite writer quotes comes from Raymond Chandler; “It might reasonably be said that all art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and that if it does not it dies and is forgotten.” 

Shakespeare is remembered because he aimed for mass entertainment. Shakespeare’s appeal to the general public is what makes these 10 writing tips powerful. All of them have to do with the storytelling side of his great talent. From an artistic standpoint, he was an unbelievably gifted wordsmith, but craft alone will not make a writer immortal. 

Nor, quite frankly, will storytelling divorced of good writing. Just ask Harold Robbins.

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Murder Made Simple

In 1944, Raymond Chandler wrote an essay for The Atlantic Monthly titled, "The Simple Art of Murder." It was reprinted in 1950 in book form by Houghton Mifflin along with eight of Chandler's early stories.

Chandler was highly opinionated about art, fiction, and detective stories. There are some nifty tips in here for aspiring and accomplished mystery writers.

Here are a few snippets. 

Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic ... Jane Austen’s chronicles of highly inhibited people against a background of rural gentility seem real enough psychologically. There is plenty of that kind of social and emotional hypocrisy around today.

The murder novel has also a depressing way of minding its own business, solving its own problems and answering its own questions.

Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.

Yet the detective story, even in its most conventional form, is difficult to write well. Good specimens of the art are much rarer than good serious novels. Rather second-rate items outlast most of the high velocity fiction, and a great many that should never have been born simply refuse to die at all. They are as durable as the statues in public parks and just about that dull.

"really important books" get dusty on the reprint counter, while Death Wears Yellow Garters is put out in editions of fifty or one hundred thousand copies.

At the end of "The Simple Art of Murder," Chandler gives a great definition of a hero that I abridged in an earlier post titled: What makes an appealing hero?

Link to the full article

Link to my Pinterest page on Raymond Chandler

Touchy, Touchy, Touchy

Snobs come in every variety

At Booktrust, Matt Haig started a cross-pond rhubarb with a post belittling literary snobs. Haig's article was less interesting than the responses. Dozens of people who wouldn't think twice about disparaging writers of popular fiction took umbrage that someone might criticize them. To prove elitism is not restricted to the U.K., Andrew E.M. Baumann in Georgia responded to Haig’s post with a 7,446 word diatribe of his own.

Personally, I define a book snob as someone who dismisses a work merely because it's popular. My definition would put Andrew E.M. Baumann in the snob camp because he wrote, “The demonstrated truth is that “popular” equals mediocre, or worse.” Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Ben Franklin, Owen Wister, and many others would disagree that popular equals mediocre. Raymond Chandler wrote, “It might reasonably be said that all art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and that if it does not it dies and is forgotten.” Every book that is popular is not literature, but it’s snobbery to assume that anything popular is unworthy of admiration.

So what qualifies as literature? Again, Chandler’s definition. “When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over a ball.” That pretty much does it for me.

If this debate interests you, here are the links to the two referenced postings.

30 things to tell a book snob

"30 things to tell a book snob" -- A Literary Elitist's Response

Wandering the Internet During a Writing Hiatus

When The Return was at the publishers for book design and proofreading, I had a rare opportunity to wander around the internet for no purpose other than entertainment. When writing, my online time is consumed with email, research, fact checking, and social networking. One of my favorite sites is The Atlantic. This online repository has all kinds of interesting archival material.

(In previous posts, I have referenced Atlantic articles written by Raymond Chandler. You can find his “Oscar Night Ramblings” and “Writers in Hollywood” by following this link.)

This morning I ran across this 1947 Coronet Educational Film. Coronet was a division of Esquire, a precursor of Playboy Magazine. This short really makes you think about the cultural changes in the last sixty years.

Writers in Hollywood ... Has anything changed?

Raymond Chandler is one of my favorite writers. To this day, he is well known for his novels and screenplays, but many don’t realize he also wrote magazine articles on writing and the popular culture. The following two links lead to prior posts referencing Chandler’s articles.

Oscar Night Ramblings

What makes an appealing hero?

Here are a few excerpts from an article he wrote in 1945, titled, “Writers in Hollywood.”

“Hollywood is easy to hate, easy to sneer at, easy to lampoon. Some of the best lampooning has been done by people who have never been through a studio gate, some of the best sneering by egocentric geniuses who departed huffily - not forgetting to collect their last pay check – leaving behind them nothing but the exquisite aroma of their personalities and a botched job for the tired hacks to clean up.”

“…writers are employed to write screenplays on the theory that, being writers, they have a particular gift and training for the job, and are then prevented from doing it with any independence or finality whatsoever, on the theory that, being merely writers, they know nothing about making pictures, and of course if they don't know how to make pictures, they couldn't possibly know how to write them. It takes a producer to tell them that.”

“I hold no brief for Hollywood. I have worked there a little over two years, which is far from enough to make me an authority, but more than enough to make me feel pretty thoroughly bored. That should not be so. An industry with such vast resources and such magic techniques should not become dull so soon … The making of a picture ought surely to be a rather fascinating adventure. It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion.”

If you’re interested in writing or movies, you’ll find this article fascinating. Although written sixty-five years ago, it still rings true.

This link will take you to the full article in the Atlantic Monthly archives.

Jane's Fame, How Jane Austen Conquered the World

I like to read author biographies and this is a fascinating book about a fascinating author. The first quarter is biographical, and then Claire Harman explains how Jane Austen's fame grew through the decades and centuries.

Is fame important for an author? Mass market writers aim for a huge audience, but literary authors are frequently content with select readers that can appreciate their art. Austen was undoubtedly a literary genius, but as Raymond Chandler wrote, “It might reasonably be said that all art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and that if it does not it dies and is forgotten.”

Jane knew the secret of great writing—revision. Perhaps she had no choice. Fifteen years or so elapsed between the writing of her first novel and publication. In the meantime, she honed Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibilities to perfection.

During an earlier time in my life, I spent a lot of time in Concord, Massachusetts. The biographical portion of Jane's Fame reminded me of Louisa May Alcott. They were each encouraged to write by their families, grew up surrounded by literary people and artists, and both read their stories aloud to family and friends.

Speaking of similarities, another one struck me while writing this post: Austen, Chandler, and Twain wrote contemporary fiction, but we now read their books as period fiction. Viewing their work as historical novels makes them timeless.

Another Time, Another Place, Another story

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Another Time, Another Place, Another story

Another Time, Another Place, Another story from James D. Best

View more presentations from James D. Best.

Another Time, Another Place ... Another Story

I will be making a presentation on storytelling at Trilogy Vistancia on April 22, 2010, 6:30-8:00 pm in the Tewa Ball Room. The event is not open to the public, but I have posted my presentation on Slideshare. I'm interested in any feedback.

Oscar Night Ramblings by Raymond Chandler

Whenever the Oscars come around, I'm reminded of this article written by Raymond Chandler in March of 1948. By the way, in 1948, the Oscars were broadcast on radio. I hope he will forgive some editing for brevity. The highlights are mine, of course.

Oscar Night in Hollywood

By Raymond Chandler

It isn't so much that the awards never go to fine achievements as that those fine achievements are not rewarded as such. Technically, they are voted, but they are not decided by the use of whatever critical wisdom Hollywood may possess. They are ballyhooed, pushed, yelled, screamed, and in every way propagandized into the consciousness of the voters so incessantly, in the weeks before the final balloting, that everything except the golden aura of the box office is forgotten.We elect Presidents in much the same way, so why not actors, cameramen, writers, and all rest of the people who have to do with the making of pictures? If we permit noise, ballyhoo, and theater to influence us in the selection of the people who are to run the country, why should we object to the same methods in the selection of meritorious achievements in the film business?

If you think most motion pictures are bad, which they are, find out from some initiate how they are made, and you will be astonished that any of them could be good. The point is not whether the average motion picture is bad, but whether the motion picture is an artistic medium of sufficient dignity and accomplishment to be treated with respect. Those who deride the motion picture usually are satisfied that they have thrown the book at it by declaring it to be a form of mass entertainment. As if that meant anything. Greek drama, which is still considered quite respectable by most intellectuals, was mass entertainment to the Athenian freeman. So was the Elizabethan drama. It might reasonably be said that all art becomes mass entertainment, and that if it does not it dies and is forgotten.

Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. In painting, music, and architecture we are not even second-rate by comparison with the best work of the past. Our novels are transient propaganda when they are what is called "significant," and bedtime reading when they are not.

Show business has always been a little over noisy, over dressed, over brash. Actors are threatened people. Before films came along to make them rich they often had need of a desperate gaiety. Some of these qualities have passed into the Hollywood mores and produced that very exhausting thing, the Hollywood manner, which is a chronic case of spurious excitement over absolutely nothing.

If you can go past those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse of the human intelligence; if you can stand the hailstorm of flash bulbs popping at the poor patient actors who, like kings and queens, have never the right to look bored; if you can glance out over this gathered assemblage of what is supposed to be the elite of Hollywood and say to yourself without a sinking feeling, "In these hands lie the destinies of the only original art the modern world has conceived "; if you can stand the fake sentimentality and the platitudes of the officials and the mincing elocution of the glamour queens; if you can do all these things and not have a wild and forsaken horror at the thought that most of these people actually take this shoddy performance seriously; and if you can then go out into the night to see half the police force of Los Angeles gathered to protect the golden ones from the mob in the free seats; if you can do all these things and still feel next morning that the picture business is worth the attention of one single intelligent, artistic mind, then in the picture business you certainly belong, because this sort of vulgarity is part of its inevitable price.

Perverse fellow that I am, I found myself intrigued by the unimportant part of the program. I was intrigued by the efficiently quick on-and-off that was given to these minnows of the picture business; by their nervous attempts via the microphone to give most of the credit for their work to some stuffed shirt; by the fact that technical developments which may mean many millions of dollars to the industry, and may on occasion influence the whole procedure of picture-making, are just not worth explaining to the audience at all; intrigued most of all perhaps by the formal tribute which is invariably made to the importance of the writer, without whom, my dear, dear friends, nothing could be done at all, but who is for all that merely the climax of the unimportant part of the program.

If the actors and actresses like the silly show, and I'm not sure at all the best of them do, they at least know how to look elegant in a strong light, and how to make with the wide-eyed and oh, so humble little speeches as if they believed them. If the big producers like it, and I'm quite sure they do because it contains the only ingredients they really understand—promotion values and the additional grosses that go with them—the producers at least know what they are fighting for. But if the quiet, earnest, and slightly cynical people who really make motion pictures like it, and I'm quite sure they don't, well, after all, it comes only once a year, and it's no worse than a lot of the sleazy vaudeville they have to push out of the way to get their work done.

But that is the real point, isn't it?—whether these annual Awards, regardless of the grotesque ritual which accompanies them, really represent anything at all of artistic importance to the motion picture medium, anything clear and honest that remains after the lights are dimmed, the minks are put away, and the aspirin is swallowed? I don't think they do. I think they are just theater and not even good theater.As for the personal prestige that goes with winning an Oscar, it may with luck last long enough for your agent to get your contract rewritten and your price jacked up another notch.

What makes an appealing hero?

I asked myself this question as I tried to figure out why the Western genre had been relegated to a couple of obscure shelves in most bookstores. I tried to noodle this out for myself until I came upon Raymond Chandler’s 1950 definition of a hero. He was describing a detective hero, but it fits nonetheless. Here is my abridged version of Chandler's hero.

Raymond Chandler

“…down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

“He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.

“The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”

When publishers and producers abandon their penchant for off-putting antiheroes and return to this model, the Western will leap back to prominence.

People want heroes they can admire and long to emulate.