The Simple Art of Murder (1944)

> He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

Wonderful essay. Are there any similar quality essays about modern detective fiction?

Someone really screwed up the OCR on that ;-)

Apart from the typos, I suspect that there's at least one paragraph in the body (the summary introduction?), that wasn't written by Mr Chandler.