THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER
by Raymond Chandler

Copyright 1934, 1935, 1936, 1938, 1939, 1944, 1950 by Raymond Chandler
Copyright 1939 by The Curtis Publishing Company

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Both _The Simple Art of Murder_ and _Pickup on Noon Street_ were originally published, in hardcover, by Houghton Mifflin Company, in 1950, and in paperback, by Ballantine Books, in 1972.
The stories in this book appeared in _The Simple Art of Murder_, Houghton Mifflin, 1950. The material in that edition originally appeared in the following magazines: _Black Mask_, _Dime Detective_, _Detective Fiction Weekly_, _The Saturday Evening Post_, _Atlantic Monthly_ and _The Saturday Review of Literature_.

First Vintage Books Edition, August 1988
ISBN 0-394-75765-3
Manufactured in the United States of America
Book design by The Sarabande Press



CONTENTS

The Simple Art of Murder 1
An Essay

Spanish Blood 19

I'll Be Waiting 66

The King in Yellow 84

Pearls Are a Nuisance 139

Pickup on Noon Street 187

Smart-Aleck Kill 231

Guns at Cyrano's 276

Nevada Gas 329



THE SIMPLE ART
OF MURDER

AN ESSAY

Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic. Old-fashioned novels which now seem stilted and artificial to the point of burlesque did not appear that way to the people who first read them. Writers like Fielding and Smollett could seem realistic in the modern sense because they dealt largely with uninhibited characters, many of whom were about two jumps ahead of the police, but Jane Austen's chronicles of highly inhibited people against a background of rural gentility seem real enough psychologically. There is plenty of that kind of social and emotional hypocrisy around today. Add to it a liberal dose of intellectual pretentiousness and you get the tone of the book page in your daily paper and the earnest and fatuous atmosphere breathed by discussion groups in little clubs. These are the people who make best sellers, which are promotional jobs based on a sort of indirect snob appeal, carefully escorted by the trained seals of the critical fraternity, and lovingly tended and watered by certain much too powerful pressure groups whose business is selling books, although they would like you to think they are fostering culture. Just get a little behind in your payments and you will find out how idealistic they are.
The detective story for a variety of reasons can seldom be promoted. It is usually about murder and hence lacks the element of uplift. Murder, which is a frustration of the individual and hence a frustration of the race, may have, and in fact has, a good deal of sociological implication. But it has been going on too long for it to be news. If the mystery novel is at all realistic (which it ver...

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