The Picador Book of Crime Writing [antikvár]

MICHAEL DIBDININTRODUCTIONThis anthology is dedicated to the proposition that good crime writing is good writing.It is a sobering comment on perceptions of the genre that this statement, which in another context would risk sounding feebly tautologous, is likely to strike some readers as controversial if not deliberately provocative. It also begs the question of what constitutes good writing.The answer is likely to emerge more lucidly fix)m the examples and commentary which follow than from any attempt at definition, but let us be clear at the outset what it is not. For a start, good crime writing has nothing whatever in common with 'fine writing*. Raymond Chandler famously defined the pulp thriller's rule of thumb: 'When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.' If Chandler transcended this formula to produce some of the greatest works of crime fiaion, it was not by spending half a page describing the door, nor by giving the man artistic attributes and a taste for the finer things in life.But for every writer who pads out a two-hundred-page detective story to twice that length with decorative frills and flounces there are ten whose work might have been written not Just on but by a word processor. Here language is conceived as a