Raymond Chandler: Breaking the Norms of the Detective Genre

Sammendrag:

Raymond Chandler is recognised as one of the most influential crime-story writers in American literature. His novels about private eye Philip Marlowe completely broke the norms of the conventional detective and mystery story. In this essay I discuss how Chandler's realistic approach and settings changed the detective genre and influenced societal norms. Simultaneously, Chandler introduced characters patterned on mythic heroes and plots based on legends. This paradoxical juxtaposition of realism and myth highlights Chandler's violations of the detective genre and defamiliarization of society. This essay closely examines both plot construction and characterisation in his first two novels, The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, in order to illustrate Chandler's technique.

Forfatterens bidrag som PDF-dokument