Time isn't up for amateur detectives

Dave Lull sent me a link to an essay in the Spectator by Alan Massie called "Murder most Serious". Alan Massie is a historical military fiction novelist, but also writes consistently interesting journalism on the crime-fiction genre. In his current outing, he discusses the English detective novel. He reminds us that Chandler praised Hammet for "having given murder back to the sort of people who commit it", a barb aimed at the classic English amateur detective story. Mr Massie believes that Chandler has won the argument:

"With only a few exceptions — Simon Brett and Andrew Taylor in his Lydmouth novels, for instance — the crime novel in Britain as in the US generally owes more to Hammett and Chandler than to Christie. Murder is given back to the sort of people who commit it and the amateur detective has given way to the policeman. Even when he is a rebel and loner, like Ian Rankin’s Rebus, who may be held to owe more to Chandler’s Marlowe or even Hammett’s Sam Spade than to your average DI, he still can’t altogether escape the requirements of police procedure, and this gives the fiction a realistic feel."

Mr Massie then goes on to dismiss the idea that "only certain sorts of people" commit murder, highlighting a few authors whose stories are about the force of circumstances, and puts forward an almost moral case for Christie and co: "Yet there is a sense in which Christie, at her best anyway, is more serious than Chandler and Hammett, simply because murder horrifies and disgusts her (even while she employs it for our amusement) as it doesn’t apparently horrify them."

There is much food for thought in the essay, but I was struck by the assertion that British crime novels are more Hammet/Chandler than Christie/Conan-Doyle. I think the assertion has to be a straw man, as the British crime fiction genre, as it is everywhere, has long since abandoned a narrow definition and escaped into the mainstream. Sticking to "books set in the UK", Mr Massie alludes to Ian Rankin, and it is certainly true that the police-procedural is thriving (thankfully), but other popular (and bestselling) authors write successfully about amateur sleuths, notably Val McDermid, M. C. Beaton (Agatha Raisin), Denise Mina, Rhys Bowen, Michelle Spring, Martin Edwards, Anne Cleeves -- I could go on. (Visit Euro Crime for lots more, including capsule summaries and links to author websites.) 

Comments

[Norm]

I wonder what Chandler and Hammett would have made of the Midsomer Murders TV series. The murder rate in this fictional English county seems to be higher than in Baltimore's The Wire.

[Roger Cornwell]

A webmaster writes:
Er, that would be Ann Cleeves...

[Maxine]

Yes, sorry, Ann Cleeves.