He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He is a common man, or he could not go among common people. In Chandler’s description: “He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is in it only for himself therefore, he is selfless. The personal honor of the private eye is the genre’s most hallowed convention. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor.” He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. Chandler believed that what redeemed the form, what made it art, or potentially art, was the character of the detective, and that the detective should be (unlike Hercule Poirot or, from another mystery writer Chandler held in contempt, Lord Peter Wimsey) a man who goes down mean streets. Chandler had aspirations for the genre, and it annoyed him that most mystery writers seemed not to, that they turned out unrealistic plot contraptions for an undemanding readership-“Murder on the Orient Express”-type theatricals, in which the solution to the mystery is usually whatever is least probable. It appeared in an essay called “The Simple Art of Murder,” published in 1944-Chandler’s attempt to define what might give a little literary dignity to the murder mystery. “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,” Raymond Chandler’s famous dictum states.
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