Are Jews really Turks? Mostly, says Arthur Koestler.

himself, was ever safe. It was this seriousness of purpose and his habit of self-deprecation that saved Chandler from being the self-indulgent monster his closest friends must at times have thought him.

Frank MacShane was given access to Raymond Chandler’s papers and letters and has put them to skillful use. He quotes just enough from Chandler’s early writing to show what it was that would eventually distinguish his work (and that of Dashiell Hammett) from other graduates of Black Mask and Dime Detective. Hammett had, as Chandler once said, taken “murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it in the alley.” To Chandler it was important to do more, to have those alley characters taken seriously, to write serious fiction, not detective stories. He returns to that theme time and again.

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himself, was ever safe. It was this seriousness of purpose and his habit of self-deprecation that saved Chandler from being the self-indulgent monster his closest friends must at times have thought him.

Frank MacShane was given access to Raymond Chandler’s papers and letters and has put them to skillful use. He quotes just enough from Chandler’s early writing to show what it was that would eventually distinguish his work (and that of Dashiell Hammett) from other graduates of Black Mask and Dime Detective. Hammett had, as Chandler once said, taken “murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it in the alley.” To Chandler it was important to do more, to have those alley characters taken seriously, to write serious fiction, not detective stories. He returns to that theme time and again.