Influences - Part One

My love of mystery stories started at an early age. My mother would take me to the library every couple of weeks and it was there that I borrowed an Enid Blyton "Secret Seven" book. I was hooked and I graduated from there to "The Famous Five" and then to the Hardy Boys, loving the search for the culprit and their motives.

It was my drama teacher, Alison Graham, who changed my love into an obsession. When I was about 13 years old, she gave me Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep", I was captivated and drawn in to the world of the American private detective, a world I still love to visit.

Chandler's genius lay in the voice he gave Philip Marlowe. The novels are written from Marlowe's perspective and some of the descriptions are completely wondrous.

In "The Big Sleep" Marlowe prepares to meet a client. "I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars."

1940's "Farewell My Lovely" has him describing a woman as "A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window."

There are many examples of his use of humour but that was not the only thing that made me a fan. He had the ability to create complex and compelling characters, believable people whose motives were the base emotions that drive everyone. His plot lines were often built from many strands and sometimes he wouldn't quite tie them all together at the end but that is part of the attraction, you are left to form your own opinion.

Chandler's own influence was Dashiel Hammett. Hammett was the first to give a voice to the real criminal underclass and Sam Spade, the detective in "The Maltese Falcon", defined what a private-eye should be.

Another less well known writer, one who deserves to stand beside these two greats of the hard-boiled detective genre, is Ross Macdonald.

Macdonald was in the next generation of writers, working from the late forties through to the early seventies. His detective, Lew Archer, is hewn from the same hard granite as his predecessors but there was added depth to the books as he pondered the psychology of criminality. He works in the fictional city of Santa Theresa, a setting that also appears in Sue Grafton's novels. Macdonald's stories are often poignant tales of the shattering of family relationships, raw emotion stripped of its civilised cloak. They are easy to relate to and frightening in how easy it is for ordinary people to become criminals as they get caught up in circumstances that spin out of control.

Unfortunately, many of Macdonald's novels are now out of print and are difficult to find but if you do come across him, I would heartily recommend that you read some of the best detective fiction ever written.

In the second part of this article, I will look closer to home at some of the British crime writers I admire.