You can start with Edgar Allan Poe if you like, but for me the story of American crime writing starts with Dashiell Hammett, who laid the egg that became the hard-boiled detective. Also he has such a dashing name, was by all accounts a noble (though often drunk) man and partner to Lillian Hellman. All good things.<\/p>\n
Despite his historical importance, Hammett doesn\u2019t make this list, I\u2019m afraid. We\u2019ll start with his first great disciple instead, the man who put crime back on the streets where it belongs,\u00a0<\/span>but took the prose to the stars.<\/p>\n Raymond Chandler<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n The thing with Chandler is his style. The plots ramble and there\u2019s at least one unexplained body in his novels. He wrote very few novels and they\u2019re all worth reading, except\u00a0The Poodle Springs Story<\/em>, which was started by Chandler and finished by Robert Parker decades later. Ignore that one. Start with\u00a0The Big Sleep\u00a0<\/em>or\u00a0Farewell My Lovely<\/em>.<\/p>\n One request: Please, please don\u2019t then turn around and try to write like him. Too many have done that already. The world doesn\u2019t need another hard-drinking cop\/detective who lives alone with his cat.\u00a0\u00a0Poor old Philip Marlowe nearly suffered death by a thousand copies already. And we don\u2019t need another crime writer wracking his brain to shoehorn an outlandish simile into every second sentence. Chandler pretty much created the style of 20th Century crime fiction, but it\u2019s best read in the original.<\/p>\n Ross Macdonald<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n In one of Chandler\u2019s letters, he savaged Macdonald for daring to say a car was \u201cacned with rust\u201d. So maybe his prose isn\u2019t quite up to Chandler\u2019s standard. But his plots hang together far better, his insights into the dark side of family life is second to none and his protagonist is sufficiently different to Chandler\u2019s. Where Marlowe is hard as nails, Macdonald\u2019s Lew Archer has a soft side \u2013 he loves art and so on.<\/p>\n Also, Macdonald wrote many more books and managed a very consistent standard. An incredible body of work, actually. Interestingly, he seemed to tweak onto environmental issues earlier than most. In essence, his books are family dramas of which the crime is only the culmination.<\/p>\n Jim Thompson<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Now hold tight, here\u2019s a writer with incredible talents\u2026 and too many books. He even sometimes copied himself \u2013\u00a0The Killer Inside Me\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Pop. 1280\u00a0<\/em>being essentially retellings of the same story.<\/p>\n He\u2019s classic hard-boiled, but with a incredibly dark side that can make some of the books hard to take. I guess you can say Jim Thompson\u2019s books are more hard-luck than hard-boiled.<\/p>\n Now I\u2019m going out on a limb here and making a big statement: Jim Thompson\u2019s\u00a0Pop. 1280\u00a0<\/em>is my candidate for the greatest pulp crime novel out there. Period. (I slip the word \u201cpulp\u201d in there to avoid competing with\u00a0The Brothers Karamazov<\/em>.)\u00a0Pop.1280\u00a0<\/em>is a masterpiece of sustained first-person narrative. It\u2019s awesome, okay? Read it.<\/p>\n Then read\u00a0The Grifters\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Getaway<\/em>. After that, you\u2019re on your own. The books can be patchy, but there are some very good ones out there.<\/p>\n