Lead Birds and Falling Beams

Abstract

I n his oft-cited essay, Simple Art of Murder, hard-boiled fiction writer Raymond Chandler argues that, by removing puzzle-game intrigues of classic detective form and imbuing it with realism ? where murder is committed for reasons, and people talk and act as real people do ? hard-boiled innovators like Dashiell Hammett and, by implication, Chandler himself created a style that brought this generic form to a new level of artistic substance. One might easily quibble over Chandler's hierarchizing over not-art, but his remarks are interesting for way they make that distinction. At very end of essay, after describing various merits of realism over puzzle games and murder-mysteries-cum-comedies-of-manners, he says, In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption (237). Surely readers ofthe classic detective story would not be surprised to read such a statement from pen of, say, a Dorothy Sayers or a Ronald Knox, whose own cant runs to theological and whose puzzle stories represent a putting-back-inorder. The detective's role, for them, is to make order of chaos: a spirit central to whole issue of redemption. As W. H. Auden argues in his essay, Guilty Vicarage, the detective story addict