Smoking guns and smouldering lips: 'The Big Sleep'

Raymond Chandler, author of the 1939 novel 'The Big Sleep', famously claimed that his contemporary, Dashiell Hammett (author of The Maltese Falcon) had taken murder out of the vicar's rose garden and given it 'back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse'. He was having a dig at what he considered the genteel tradition of English detective fi ction, above all the province of female writers from the 1930s (Agatha Christie, Marjorie Allingham, etc).