what makes a good detective story - it's not the plot

By reading detective stories from the 1930s, 40s and 50s, we enter perhaps the defining world of this genre.

RAYMOND CHANDLER

And the master of the genre was Raymond Chandler, who wrote about the underworld of Los Angeles, but who went to school near London:

It also helps to actually appreciate the richness of the writing style of Raymond Chandler language, in that "the master of hard-boiled detective fiction, is renowned for his distinctive literary style that reshaped the genre".

And the fact that he was educated in England before moving back to the States, means that Chandler’s slang is carefully crafted. And as an 'outsider' in Los Angeles, he challenged the way these stories were traditionally written: "My theory was that the readers just thought they cared about nothing but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, the thing they cared about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description."

Or, as others say on Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe, this is what we like about the stories:

It's not the detective plot, [but] the noirish palette to everything, the enviably snappy dialogue, or terse brilliance of Chandler's prose...

This is why his books are so acclaimed - in that Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is in search of dignity:

One of the important aspects spoken about Raymond Chandler’s books is the style of the author. Chandler’s language was tough, he could throw one liners the same way Mike Tyson could throw a knockout punch, the dialog was witty and hard, the characters colorful and the plot convoluted. You did not read Chandler for the plot. (Indeed his plots sometime have holes which even Chandler himself couldn’t fill. When asked as to who killed the driver in ‘The Big Sleep’, Chandler is supposed to have remarked that he had no clue. Or something to that effect.) 

You read Chandler for his style the first time but when you keep returning back to his books, the realization dawns that beyond the style lies Chandler’s moral compass, which ensures the story moves in the right direction. It is this moral center which according to me has given immortality to Chandler’s best books. If there is one theme which seem to hold together the best novels of Chandler: ‘The Big Sleep’, ‘The Long Goodbye’, ‘Farewell My Lovely’ and ‘The High Window’, it is the search for dignity. In all these novels, Marlowe is trying his best to restore the sense of dignity of his client, even if this process hurts him personally sometimes.

BRITISH CRIME FICTION

Shockingly (!) Raymond Chandler took down Sherlock Holmes - that is, "the eccentric sleuths" modeled after Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe.

Their stories go something like this: 

In the traditional Golden Age plot, a murder occurs — but not for any apparent reason beyond puzzle solving. After the discovery of the body (which is almost never found rotting), the private detective arrives on the scene, which is usually somewhere sensational, like a Georgian mansion or a yacht traveling the Nile. From here, suspects are questioned and clues examined. It’s an impersonal affair, almost like moving chess pieces or trying the Sunday crossword. By the end, the detective will assemble all of the concerned parties and explain to them how he or she solved the case with superhuman intelligence and the supernatural power of never being wrong. The criminal is then dramatically outed.

Not that Chandler had anything against chess and problem-solving - as his detective Marlowe enjoyed replaying classic chess games - but he did dislike the escapist lack of realism in classic British detective stories:

“The Simple Art of Murder,” which was first published in The Atlantic in December 1944, is essentially Chandler laying bare the ethos behind hard-boiled detective fiction... For Chandler, the detective novel should be a “realist in murder,” meaning it should inhabit “a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities.” ... Chandler expounds upon how detective novels should represent the unsafe world of precarious civilization, not the idealized and contained world of the country house.

Raymond Chandler’s grudge against British mysteries has been reconsidered over the years - a recurring point being that Chandler slammed English detective novels and their authors time and again, but he didn't hate the literature, just the class snobbery.

Perhaps his criticism has been over-interpreted:

“Chandler despised the English school of crime writing,” pronounces the late modern English Crime Queen P. D. James in her short genre survey, Talking about Detective Fiction (2009). Similar pearls of conventional wisdom have been placed before us by authorities who similarly have overgeneralized Chandler’s hostility toward the puzzle-oriented English detective novel. In The Life of Raymond Chandler, for example, Frank MacShane sweepingly refers to “Chandler’s dislike of deductive detective stories,” while in Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories, the academic scholar Leonard Cassuto categorically declares that “Chandler rejects the puzzle-whodunit.”

It seems that Chandler was a little less brutal:

In analyzing “The Simple Art of Murder” writers tend to focus on Chandler’s criticism of artificiality within the mystery genre, yet in his essay Chandler in fact spends much of his time blasting the classical English detective novel on what clearly are class-related grounds...

Throughout his “Simple Art” essay, Chandler repeatedly sounds cutting class notes. When praising his hard-boiled predecessor Dashiell Hammett for bringing something fundamentally new and bracingly authentic to the detective fiction genre, Chandler tellingly complains of English mystery novelists larding their tales with “dukes and Venetian vases.” In a famous statement, Chandler declares that “Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it was a good idea to begin by getting as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing.” Later he lauds Hammett (and by implication himself) for giving “murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.” Elsewhere Chandler sneers at English “detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility.”

FRIEDRICH GLAUSER:

The Swiss-German writer Friedrich Glauser is not well-known in the English-speaking world, but the Friedrich-Glauser-Preis has become the most prestigious award for crime fiction in the German-speaking world.

Indeed, much crime fiction in German has been marginalised:

Until relatively recently, German academia had largely ignored their home-grown talent and focused their scholarly efforts instead on the canonical English-language authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. As influential as these writers have been, Hall argues that this is a mistake, as “German-language crime fiction has also been shaped by its own crime writing heritage, for in the case of the early detective story, it was German-speaking crime writers who led the way”.

His English-language publisher says that Friedrich Glauser is "often referred to as the Swiss Simenon":

In 1939, a year after Glauser's death, the film of 'Thumbprint', the first Sergeant Studer mystery, was greeted with critical acclaim and commercial success. Studer became more famous than his creator, the mark of true success for a fictional detective. Glauser's elegant prose and acute observation conjure up a world of those at the margins of society. His Sergeant Studer novels have ensured his place as a cult figure in Europe.

An online blog on Friedrich Glauser looks at what makes him so special, even today:

Glauser wrote six detective stories, five of them featuring Sergeant Jacob Studer of Bern police. The novels are modelled on the Commissaire Maigret stories by Georges Simenon, as the author freely admitted. Not the criminal case as such is the main issue but the people and the atmosphere in which they move. Both Maigret and Studer are petit-bourgeois, in both cases the whole personality does the investigation, not just the intellect and both are very different from their authors .

He wrote 'anti-detective fiction' - creating a sort of Atmosphere of Malaise:

Friedrich Glauser's Motto regiert (1936) tells a story with parabolic qualities: Sergeant Studer must investigate a murder that has taken place in a Swiss psychiatric clinic. The social and political issues that are roiling Europe in the years leading up to World War Two find condensed expression in this microcosm. The essay focuses on the literary devices the text employs to create atmosphere and asks how atmosphere functions both to support the construction of a classic murder mystery, while also subverting some of its generic conventions. The figure of the detective is of central importance, as he is portrayed as uncommonly sensitive to the atmosphere of his surroundings. At the same time, however, the clinic's atmosphere ultimately proves to some extent unreadable. Hence, Glauser's text can be viewed as a precursor of the what in post-war literature will come to be known as anti-detective fiction.

His English translator tells more about Glauser's sensitivity:

What particularly attracts me about Glauser’s crime novels is the way his detective — Sergeant Studer — understands and sympathises with the disadvantaged, even if his job means he has to continue to investigate them. There is a profound sense of humanity permeating Glauser’s writing, which at the same time throws a keen light on social conditions in Switzerland in the 1930s, but coming across as a concern for individuals rather than as a political message.

Here's a taste from his English translator: "From "Fever"" by Friedrich Glauser at Words Without Borders

So, yes, there's more to detective fiction than the plot...

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