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THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER
by Raymond Chandler

Copyright 1934, 1935, 1936, 1938, 1939, 1944, 1950 by Raymond Chandler
Copyright 1939 by The Curtis Publishing Company

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Both _The Simple Art of Murder_ and _Pickup on Noon Street_ were originally published, in hardcover, by Houghton Mifflin Company, in 1950, and in paperback, by Ballantine Books, in 1972.
The stories in this book appeared in _The Simple Art of Murder_, Houghton Mifflin, 1950. The material in that edition originally appeared in the following magazines: _Black Mask_, _Dime Detective_, _Detective Fiction Weekly_, _The Saturday Evening Post_, _Atlantic Monthly_ and _The Saturday Review of Literature_.

First Vintage Books Edition, August 1988
ISBN 0-394-75765-3
Manufactured in the United States of America
Book design by The Sarabande Press



CONTENTS

The Simple Art of Murder 1
An Essay

Spanish Blood 19

I'll Be Waiting 66

The King in Yellow 84

Pearls Are a Nuisance 139

Pickup on Noon Street 187

Smart-Aleck Kill 231

Guns at Cyrano's 276

Nevada Gas 329



THE SIMPLE ART
OF MURDER

AN ESSAY

Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic. Old-fashioned novels which now seem stilted and artificial to the point of burlesque did not appear that way to the people who first read them. Writers like Fielding and Smollett could seem realistic in the modern sense because they dealt largely with uninhibited characters, many of whom were about two jumps ahead of the police, but 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. Add to it a liberal dose of intellectual pretentiousness and you get the tone of the book page in your daily paper and the earnest and fatuous atmosphere breathed by discussion groups in little clubs. These are the people who make best sellers, which are promotional jobs based on a sort of indirect snob appeal, carefully escorted by the trained seals of the critical fraternity, and lovingly tended and watered by certain much too powerful pressure groups whose business is selling books, although they would like you to think they are fostering culture. Just get a little behind in your payments and you will find out how idealistic they are.
The detective story for a variety of reasons can seldom be promoted. It is usually about murder and hence lacks the element of uplift. Murder, which is a frustration of the individual and hence a frustration of the race, may have, and in fact has, a good deal of sociological implication. But it has been going on too long for it to be news. If the mystery novel is at all realistic (which it very seldom is) it is written in a certain spirit of detachment; otherwise nobody but a psychopath would want to write it or read it. The murder novel has also a depressing way of minding its own business, solving its own problems and answering its own questions. There is nothing left to discuss, except whether it was well enough written to be good fiction, and the people who make up the half-million sales wouldn't know that anyway. The detection of quality in writing is difficult enough even for those who make a career of the job, without paying too much attention to the matter of advance sales.
The detective story (perhaps I had better call it that, since the English formula still dominates the trade) has to find its public by a slow process of distillation. That it does do this, and holds on thereafter with such tenacity, is a fact; the reasons for it are a study for more patient minds than mine. 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. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount; it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.
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. 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 as dull.
This fact is annoying to people of what is called discernment. They do not like it that penetrating and important works of fiction of a few years back stand on their special shelf in the library marked "Best-sellers of Yesteryear" or something, and nobody goes near them but an occasional shortsighted customer who bends down, peers briefly and hurries away; while at the same time old ladies jostle each other at the mystery shelf to grab off some item of the same vintage with such a title as _The Triple Petunia Murder Case_ or _Inspector Pinchbottle to the Rescue_. They do not like it at all that "really important books" (and some of them are too, in a way) get the frosty mitt at the reprint counter while _Death Wears Yellow Garters_ is put out in editions of fifty or one hundred thousand copies on the newsstands of the country, and is obviously not there just to say goodbye.
To tell the truth, I do not like it very much myself. In my less stilted moments I too write detective stories, and all this immortality makes just a little too much competition. Even Einstein couldn't get very far if three hundred treatises of the higher physics were published every year, and several thousand others in some form or other were hanging around in excellent condition, and being read too.