In the Review’s February 8 issue, Geoffrey O’Brien tries to get to the bottom of one of his abiding passions, the crime novel. Alongside several recent books about the genre, he surveys a passel of yellowed paperbacks “from thrift shops and attics”—by writers ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle and Eugène Sue to Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and Ed McBain—in an attempt “to contemplate crime fiction in its totality.” “Such a book was a city held in the hand, a portable labyrinth,” O’Brien observes. “At every turn signs could be detected, marks hovering in the air around faces, housefronts, patterns of rubble and erosion denoting a shifting border between safety and terror, free movement and confinement.”

Below, alongside O’Brien’s essay, we have compiled a selection of writing about crime novelists from our archives.

Geoffrey O’Brien
A Craving for Crime

Perhaps only after a lifetime of immersion in crime fiction can one begin to wonder what all those stories have really imparted.

John Banville
Philip Marlowe’s Revolution

“Being himself a kind of drifter, Raymond Chandler knew whereof he wrote. The mean streets down which his protagonist Philip Marlowe ventures stalwartly and alone mark the liminal frontiers between wealth and indigence, between law and some kind of order, between the city and the jungle.”

James Sallis
Manchette: Into the Muck

“For Jean-Patrick Manchette, crime novels became far more than simple entertainment; they became a means of facing society’s failures head on. One after another the curtains will be torn back. Pretense. Deceit. Manipulation. Till there in the small, choked room behind it all we witness society’s true engines—greed and violence—grinding away.”

Michael Chabon
Inventing Sherlock Holmes

“Detective Freud might well conclude that Conan Doyle never entirely recovered from the pain and humiliation first of watching his mother cuckold his demented father in his own house, and then of being obliged to stand by as the old man was packed off to the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum, never to return.”

Margaret Atwood
Mystery Man

“In a ‘clues’ novel, everything depended on who was where; in a Hammett one, it was more likely to be who was who, given to disguises and false names as these folk were. The action was dispersed, not sealed up as in a nobody-leaves-this-house puzzle: dark mean streets were prowled, cars were driven at speed, people blew in from elsewhere and hid out and skipped town…. There was a lot of drinking, of substances I had never heard of, and a great deal of smoking. As an eleven-year-old I found this world very, very sophisticated.”

Hilary Mantel
Crime and Puzzlement

“P. D. James does not give us the bloodless corpses of a more genteel age—her images are graphic, though never gloating—and she aims to run the gamut of society, from the lord to the tramp.”

Julian Symons
The Christie Mystery

“Behind the middle-class English lady, remote and shy, whose perfectly appropriate occupation seemed to be the pouring of tea from a silver jug into thin china cups on a green lawn, was somebody else, somebody perhaps not so nice but more interesting.

This other Agatha Christie knew a lot about poisons.”

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