George Orwell, in his essay "Raffles and Miss Blandish," first published in Horizon in October 1944, applied what he described as a "sociological" reading to E. W. Hornung's "amateur cracksman" stories and to René Raymond's best-selling novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), published under his best-known pseudonym, James Hadley Chase. Orwell chose these two crime writers because they both played "the limelight on the criminal rather than the policeman," and he was concerned about the "immense difference in moral atmosphere between the two books and the change in the popular attitude that this probably implies." Although Orwell describes the writing in No Orchids for Miss Blandish as "brilliant . . . with hardly a wasted word or a jarring note," he did feel that reading it was to take "a header into the cesspool," an assessment consistent with his politics, since he saw No Orchids for Miss Blandish as pure fascism...