Anthony Hopkins in the film version of Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs: a baroque plot brought to life with intelligent characterisation and fine prose Photo: Alamy
The Telegraph - 21 Oct 2013
Somewhere in Crime Writer Heaven I picture the shade of Raymond Chandler beaming at the news that the Crime Writers’ Association has voted two of his books among the 10 best crime novels ever written. Or at least he’s beaming until he looks at the other names on the Top 10 – and then I imagine, to use one of his own phrases, his smile becoming as faint as a fat lady at a firemen’s ball.
It would not please Chandler to know that novels by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers are deemed the equal of his. “This is the type that is guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop. Only a halfwit could guess it,” he said of the famously ingenious solution to the mystery in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. He hated the unrealistic, fastidiously plotted murders that appeared in the novels of the English “Golden Age” writers: “The police … know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.”
On the other hand, even Chandler’s most fervent admirers have to admit that there are times when he could have been less cavalier with his plotting. Howard Hawks, when making the film version of The Big Sleep, spotted an untied plot thread in the novel and sent Chandler a telegram asking “Who killed the chauffeur?” Chandler cabled back: “Damned if I know.”
Personally, I think it’s a cause for celebration that this list, compiled from a poll of members of the Crime Writers’ Association to mark its 60th birthday, has found room for writers as fundamentally different as Christie and Chandler. It is a reminder that crime fiction is not as formulaic as its detractors make out. That unlikely detective-story addict Bertolt Brecht once likened the critic who declares that all crime novels are the same to the ignoramus who thinks all black people look the same.
The 10 novels chosen by the CWA offer a course in the history of the crime novel’s development. The oldest books on the list – Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) – are vibrant melodramas, full of gusto and eccentric characters. By the time we come to Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and Murder on the Orient Express (1934), violent death has become a parlour game, with plotting prized over characterisation.
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