Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)

A selective list of online literary criticism for Raymond Chandler, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the Modern Language Association Guidelines for Web Pages


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Literary criticism - Raymond Chandler

Hiney, Tom. The first chapter in Hiney's Raymond Chandler, A Biography Also a NYTimes review, 6/22/97

Horsley, Lee. An introduction to Raymond Chandler from the Literary Encyclopedia, 18 July 2001

Horsley, Lee. Introduction to Farewell My Lovely, from the Literary Encyclopedia

MacDonald, Susan Peck. "Chandler's American style." Style, Winter, 2005

Peters, Michael Scott. "Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir." Literature Film Quarterly, 2003

Links to original NYTimes reviews (from the 1930s-1950s) of The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, The Lady in the Lake, and The Long Goodbye

Reading Group Guide for The Long Goodbye, from Random House

A brief review of some of Raymond Chandler's works, stresses how enjoyable they are. By Robert Westbrook


Hard-boiled Fiction

Berger, Roger A. '"The Black Dick': race, sexuality, and discourse in the L.A. novels of Walter Mosley" [African American detective novels] African American Review, Summer, 1997

Breu, Christopher. A review of Hard-Boiled Masculinities (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005). Reviewed by Justin Cober-Lake in Pop Matters. Publisher's blub for Hard-Boiled Masculinities

Breen, Jon L. "The Ellery Queen mystery: why is the corpus no longer alive?" Weekly Standard, Oct 10, 2005

Catano, James V. "Detecting change: Gender and ethnicity in the detective novel." Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 2000

Cawelti, John. Publisher's blurb for Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Univ. of Chicago, 1976)

Chandler, Raymond. "The Simple Act of Murder." The Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1945

Demko, George. "Landscapes of Crime." An attractive web site on the geographical settings of mysteries, includes studies of international settings, from a Dartmouth professor

Entin, Joseph. "A new deal for thirties literature." Three recent studies of 1930s writing are reviewed, in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2000

Fister, Barbara. "Copycat Crimes: Crime Fiction and the Marketplace of Anxieties." [draft of an article that appeared in Clues: A Journal of Detection 23.3 (Spring 2005): 43-56.]

Gray, Russel W. "Hard-boiled black easy: genre conventions in A Red Death." [on Walter Mosley] African American Review, Fall, 2004

Hopler, Jay. "Watching the detectives: reading dime novels and hard-boiled detective stories in context." Journal of Social History, Winter, 2002

Horsley, Lee. Extract from The Noir Thriller (Palgrave, 2001)

Lehman, David. "The Mysterious Romance of Murder: The enduring highbrow fascination with detective stories." In Boston Review, Feb/March 2000

Leitch, Thomas. "Twelve fallacies in contemporary adaptation theory." Criticism, Spring, 2003

Paradis, Kenneth. "Warshawski's Situation: Beauvoirean Feminism and the Hard-Boiled Detective." First page of essay only. In South Central Review, Vol. 18, No. 3/4

Porter, Dennis. Review of The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. (Yale Univ. Press, 1981). Reviewed in Journal of European Studies, by H.M. Klein 12 (47): 224

Priestman, Martin, ed. blurb for The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction

Pronzini, Bill and Jack Adrian, eds. A short review of Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories (Oxford Univ. Press), in Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1997, reviewed by Douglas Levin

Silver, Alain. "Kiss Me Deadly: Evidence of a Style," [Mickey Spillane film adaptation] from Film Noir Reader (1996)

Smith, Johanna M. "Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction: Gendering the Canon," first page of essay only. Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 26, No. 1/2 (Jul., 1991), pp. 78-84

Willett, Ralph. "Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction," covers major authors, detectives, and settings including Harlem, Los Angeles, Miami, urban and desert landscapes. From the British Assoc. of American Studies, BAAS Pamphlet No. 23 (1992)

Introduction to Ross MacDonald from Books and Writers, Kuusankoski Public Library, Finland


Web Sites

Horsley, Lee and Katharine. "Crime Culture," an academic web site on crime fiction, crime film, and true crime. Includes original articles, syllabi, recommended secondary bibliography for teaching crime fiction, and more

Marling, William. "Hard-boiled detective fiction," contains essays by Dr. Marling on early writers of hard-boiled fiction, classic writers, and later writers in this style, an extensive secondary bibliography, and more

Black Mask Magazine "the classic hard-boiled pulp crime mag." Slickly produced and informative, includes pages on the history of the genre and some early tales from Black Mask


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