How to Make a Marlowe in 12 Easy Lessons (Part 2)

            Here are the remaining (abridged) lessons from Raymond Chandler, not all of which I agree with. (personal comments included in parantheses, and the full version of these lessons can be found in this book)

Addenda

1.     The perfect detective story cannot be written.
2.       The most effective way to conceal a simple mystery is behind another mystery. This is literary legerdemain. You do not fool the reader by hiding clues but by making him solve the wrong problem.
3.       It has been said that “nobody cares about the corpse.” This is bunk. It is throwing away a valuable element. It is like saying the murder of your aunt means no more to you than the murder of an unknown man in an unknown part of a city you never visited.
4.       Flip dialogue is not wit.
5.       A mystery serial does not make a good mystery novel.
6.       Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery story because it creates a type of suspense that is antagonistic and not complementary to the detective’s struggle to solve the problem. The kind of love interest that works is the one that complicates the problem by adding to the detective’s troubles but which at the same time you instinctively feel will not survive the story. A really good detective never gets married. He would lose his detachment, and this detachment is part of his charm.
7.        The fact that love interest is played up in the big magazines and on the screen doesn’t make it artistic. Women are supposed to be the targets of magazine fiction and movies (says who?). The magazines are not interested in mystery writing as an art. They are not interested in any kind of writing as an art (again, says who?).
8.       The hero of the mystery story is the detective. Everything hangs on his personality. If he hasn’t one, you have very little. And you have very few really good mystery stories. Naturally.
9.       The criminal cannot be the detective. This is an old rule and has once in a while been violated successfully, but it is sound as it ever was. For this reason: the detective by tradition and definition is the seeker after truth. He can’t be that if he already knows the truth. There is an implied guarantee to the reader that the detective is on the level.
10.      The same remark applies to the story where the first-person narrator is the criminal. Conceal nothing.
11.      The murderer must not be a loony. The murderer is not a murderer unless he commits murder in the legal sense.
12.      There is no real possibility of absolute perfection in writing a mystery story.
13.      All fiction depends on some form of suspense.