SOURCE: "Raymond Chandler & An American Genre," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. XIV, No. 1, Winter, 1973, pp. 149-73.

In the following essay, Beekman maintains that Chandler's writings transcend the ordinary limitations of mystery-detective fiction through the author's acute consciousness of style and expert use of simile, metaphor, and characterization.

The Traditional Detective Novel is not a novel at all but an intellectual game on the level of acrostics or checkers. Like any other game it answers to certain strict rules and such injunctions have been legislated by such early practitioners as Dorothy Sayers, S. S. Van Dine, Freeman Wills Crofts, not to mention scores of articles and histories of the genre. As in the nature of games, one is either addicted to whodunits or one despises them.

A famous supporter is W. H. Auden who, in a fascinating essay written with a pen dipped in Holy Water, not only openly...