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The Big Sleep
When Shakespeare wrote his plays in blank verse, he wasn't trying to high hat his customers. That's what the ticket buyers of his time expected. It was the commercial form of the day.
That was OK with WS.
Rejecting the notion that the fate of an artist is to starve, WS chose themes no less sensational than those which make our own Best Seller lists today -- murder, love, war, blood, sword play, double crossing and cross dressing.
What he did was elevate the lurid into high art.
The crime story, the murder mystery, the private eye caper;-- these are the commercial forms of our own time. As I like to tell my writing students, even our illiterate presidents read them. So don’t dismiss the form out of hand. Wasn’t The Brothers Karamazov a crime story? Choosing to write in this genre may not guarantee you will get published. What it does is maximize your chances for that to happen.
And indeed it is the form in which I write myself. For instance, "Goodbye," the Simon & Schuster novel of mine chosen by Book-of-the-Month was a murder mystery thriller.
Let me hasten to say we both know being picked by the BOM is no measure of literary merit, up or down. But it does attest to a certain professional, hands-on knowledge of the market: how to get a story out from between your ears, down on paper, an agent found, and the book in print paid for by someone else.
Spenser, Nero Wolfe, Elvis Cole, Sam Spade, Joe Pike, Jesse Stone, Sunny Randall, Lindsay Boxer, Kay Scarpetta, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple;-- I read and re-read them all. But I love Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe best, and for the record let me state here my belief that The Big Sleep is the one most likely to be read a hundred years from now.
In England, these stories often take the Miss Marple form: murder committed in front of the fire place and solved over the tea cups by someone very like your maiden aunt. No wonder the name they give the genre is, cozies.
The American version is darker. Taking us deep into Joseph Campbellland, "Sleep" is a modern dress replay of a powerful myth. In answer to a phone call, the lonely redeemer leaves his shabby office and gets into his nine-year-old-car, beginning a perilous voyage to right the wrongs of a world in which he is the moral superior of the Hollywood stars and Santa Barbara oil millionaires who hire him. Its' power is that of the fairy tale: we know in front that no matter how dark the night, the crime will be found out, there will be a happy ending. Where Chandler takes us the step beyond is Marlowe’s bittersweet realization that the evil in the human heart never ends, there is a role for him to play in this world, there will be another crime for him to solve tomorrow.
The Big Sleep
When Shakespeare wrote his plays in blank verse, he wasn't trying to be precious. That's what the paying customers of that time expected. It was the commercial form of the day.
That was OK with WS.
Rejecting the notion that the fate of an artist is to starve, WS chose themes no less sensational than those which make our own Best Seller lists today -- murder, love, war, blood, sword play, double crossing and cross dressing.
What he did was elevate the lurid into high art.
The crime story, the murder mystery, the private eye caper;-- these are the commercial forms of our own time. As I like to tell my writing students, even our illiterate presidents read them. So don’t dismiss the form out of hand. Wasn’t The Brothers Karamazov a crime story? Choosing to write in this genre may not guarantee you will get published. What it does is maximize your chances for that to happen.
And indeed it is the form in which I write myself. For instance, "Goodbye," the Simon & Schuster novel of mine chosen by Book-of-the-Month was a murder mystery thriller.
Let me hasten to say we both know being picked by the BOM is no measure of literary merit, up or down. But it does attest to a certain professional, hands-on knowledge of the market: how to get a story out from between your ears, down on paper, an agent found, and the book in print paid for by someone else.
Spenser, Nero Wolfe, Elvis Cole, Sam Spade, Joe Pike, Jesse Stone, Sunny Randall, Lindsay Boxer, Kay Scarpetta, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple;-- I read and re-read them all. But I love Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe best, and for the record let me state here my belief that The Big Sleep is the one most likely to be read a hundred years from now.
In England, these stories often take the Miss Marple form: murder committed in front of the fire place and solved over the tea cups by someone very like your maiden aunt. No wonder the name they give the genre is, cozies.
The American version is darker. Taking us deep into Joseph Campbellland, "Sleep" is a modern dress replay of a powerful myth. In answer to a phone call, the lonely redeemer leaves his shabby office and gets into his nine-year-old-car, beginning a perilous voyage to right the wrongs of a world in which he is the moral superior of the Hollywood stars and Santa Barbara oil millionaires who hire him. Its' power is that of the fairy tale: we know in front that no matter how dark the night, the crime will be found out, there will be a happy ending. Where Chandler takes us the step beyond is Marlowe’s bittersweet realization that the evil in the human heart never ends, there is a role for him to play in this world, there will be another crime for him to solve tomorrow.
