In his famous – and to
my mind famously wrongheaded – essay about “mysteries”, W.H. Auden wrote:
“Actually, whatever he
may say, I think Mr. Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories,
but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his
powerful but extremely depressing hooks should be read and judged, not as
escape literature, but as works of art.”
We have long accepted
not only Chandler but every motherfucker who writes as writing works of art.
Art is a category, not a laudative. The reason
that this passage sticks with me is the naming of the Great Wrong Place.
I have often felt like
I have spent a considerable portion of my life in the Great Wrong Place, and that it didn’t
have to be like that. This is why, I suppose, I am so fascinated by seedy
stories of crimes and misappropriations during the Cold War, and the entire
history of that encounter between two bad options, squeezing us, the
inhabitants of our various Great Wrong Places, into slots that we did not chose
and knew were not optional.
The Cold War is over
and now we live through its shredded supplements – oh, how recently the Great
Global War on Terror died, to be replaced by the Putin wars! And meantime,
Chandler’s mean streets have been gentrified – but the mean is there, as plain
as ever, and when it is pointed out, the books in which it is pointed out are
banned in the libraries of Florida and Texas. Naturally.
Within the crime
statistics, you can find the corpses of so many choked revolutions. But how
many revolutions can the cops and their bosses choke?
Surely a puzzle for
some crime novel detective.
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