Supper Sleuths

When modern crime fiction arrived in the 1960s, it did so based on the early work of American writers Carroll John Daly (Race Williams, prototype for Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer), James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler who flourished before World War II. These American writers rebelled against the traditional British form of fiction (the “cozy” or “country house” murder that Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers did so well). These “cozies” had no relevance to these American writers who saw the results of the Depression and the rise of gangster crime in American cities. Termed “hard-boiled,” this fiction was hard-edged, violent, and realistic. In the beginning this fiction mostly contained the private detective character. The private detective or private eye (P.I.) was usually a loner, and after Chandler, a “knight errant” whose profile was reminiscent of the western lawman striving to keep order in an out-of-control world.

Raymond Chandler’s conception of the fictional detective comes to fruition in his character, Philip Marlowe. In his often quoted essay “The Simple Art of Murder” (Atlantic Monthly, 1944), Chandler saw the detective as a modern knight “in search of a hidden truth.”

Black Mask magazine developed the first truly original American style of detective fiction, and Dashiell Hammett was one of its first contributors with his nameless San Francisco Continental Op PI character. His most famous creation remains Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Because of his characters’ ring of veracity, Chandler said, Hammett ”gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse” (“The Simple Art of Murder,”Atlantic Monthly, 1944).
(Encylopedia of Mystery and Detection, Steinbrunner & Penzler, 1976 & Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction, Ashley, 2002)

The following is a list of titles by both Raymond Chandler & Dashiell Hammett. Whenever possible, the series is in order of publication date. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and please let us know if you feel that a title should be here. Many short story compilations were left off this list. Please read one or more title of each author, and come prepared to discuss your impressions of them with the group.