by Ed Gorman

After establishing Chandler and Macdonald as masters of masters, he then proceeds to find all their progeny wanting in one way or another. He lays some heavy duty blame on contemporary crime writers for writing novels that are "devoid of creative or artistic interest." Wow, that's pretty snarky, Ben, and the only time you get nasty in the whole piece. The entire field of "the American detective" novel is without artistic interest?

Really? The entire field?

All the contemporary bestselling crime writers Yagoda denounces are superior to Raymond Chandler in at least one respect--they're telling the truth about their turf and their time. As much as I love Chandler, and God I do, he was a sheltered, middle-class, middle-aged male who got virtually all of his street savvy from B movies and pulp magazines. Given some of his boardroom scenes, he was pretty tin-eared there, too. His businessmen also came from the pulps, which is curious because Chandler was a businessman himself. (The one exception was the gent who hires Marlowe in the first chapter of The Lady In The Lake. A fine quick sketch.)

The man Yagoda calls "the greatest worker in this field" is indeed a wonderful writer and a true writer. But Chandler's mean streets were mostly the fantasies of a sad, lonely, alcoholic man dying the noble death of Roland for the sake of all mankind. There's a lot of self-pity in that Down These Streets A Man Must Go routine.

Few writers yield as much reader-pleasure as Chandler, but as a reporter he was pretty bad. He is always praised for his descriptions of Los Angeles culture, high and low. But when you compare any of his novels to Day of The Locust, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? or to the work of John Fante or Charles Bukowski, you see how thin his reportage was.

Where in Chandler is the poverty, the suffering, the rage, the street insanity, the street crime, the simple oddness (think of Hammett's The Dain Curse, for example) and eventually the war that were all so much a part of Chandler's time in California--and that were rarely even hinted at in his work. Nathaniel West, Horace McCoy, Fante and Bukowski could break both your face and your heart with their reportage. And they all worked very much in the hardboiled manner. Except for his brilliant The Long Goodbye, Chandler's work as a portrait of LA never came close.

What I'm saying here is that the contemporary writers Yagoda denigrates are, if nothing else, much better reporters than Chandler ever was. And in reportage--as proved by everybody from Theodore Dreiser to Norman Mailer--is truth.

Take just one of his examples. Lawrence Block, in addition to being a first-rate storyteller, gives us a detailed and realistic look at the New York city of his lifetime. The city is a living character in his books, one so seminal it informs virtually everything that happens in the course of a given novel.

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