5/25/2023 0 Comments The widow simenon![]() ![]() But when I discovered that the author of the Maigret series – which I knew chiefly through the BBC television series with Rupert Davies – was also the author of stand-alone novels, my expectations of the genre changed and expanded. By then I had already graduated from Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers to Dashiell Hammett and the chill ambiguity of Patricia Highsmith. ![]() ![]() It had never occurred to me that thrillers were anything less. When, at university, I came across WH Auden’s suggestion that Raymond Chandler’s books “should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art”, I was bewildered. My taste in literary fiction – I read every word of Patrick Hamilton and Graham Greene – was towards those authors whose techniques most closely resembled those of thriller writers. Anyone could create a mystery, but only the best could summon up a world in which the mystery could take root. A strong sense of time and place was far more exciting than a clever puzzle. Crime writing came to life when it had density, when you felt that the paint was being laid on thick. Even then I had noticed that stories supposedly driven by narrative depended for their real vitality on establishing ambience. L ike many bookish children, I grew up consuming detective fiction more than any other kind. ![]()
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