Murder by rote; Conan Doyle and Taggart on the box, Ian Rankin in the

MURDER, said Raymond Chandler, is essentially a "simple art". When you pare away the gratuitous detail, return a shoal of red herrings to the ocean and retrace your footsteps from the dankest of blind alleys, you are left with a crime and its resolution. That's it in a nutshell. "It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in," remarked Chandler, "and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it."

Of course, one of those writers was Chandler himself, who helped drag crime fiction, kicking and cussing, into the 20th century. In The Big Sleep, his first novel, published in 1939 when he was 51, he introduced Philip Marlowe, a self-mocking sleuth with an armoury of one-liners who freely admits his fallibility. He was the kind of man, reckoned Chandler, who is "neither tarnished nor afraid". Marlowe, unlike many of his prissy predecessors, went fearlessly down mean streets, for he was, for all his faults, a hero, a man of honour, with a contempt for the phoney and the corrupt.

"He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and passionate revenge," wrote Chandler. "He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and not yet too dull to be worth living in."

But despite the posturing, Chandler was loth to make too grand a claim for the detective story. A good detective story and a bad one, he felt, were about precisely the same thing, whereas a bad novel and a good novel were about entirely different things. There are no "classics" of crime and detection, he argued. "Not one." For him, a classic is "a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can never be surpassed." As examples, he mentioned Madame Bovary, War And Peace and The Brothers Karamazov. Nothing in crime fiction, not Dashiell Hammett or Conan Doyle - whose masterpiece, The Hound Of The Baskervilles, has been adapted by the BBC for our Christmas delectation - came close to these. Which is why, Chandler guessed, "people continue to assault the citadel".

Chandler made his comments in 1950 when the detective novel was regularly viewed with snooty disregard by the keepers of the great tradition. In any case, said Chandler, once you had read a detective novel, there was very little left to say about it, "except whether it was well enough written to be good fiction, and the people who make up the half-million sales wouldn't know that anyway". It would be hard to imagine a contemporary crime writer referring so dismissively to their audience.

Certainly, since Chandler's day, crime fiction's stock has risen, not least because of television and film adaptations. It is studied in universities and bought by the barrowload. Ian Rankin's thrillers featuring the Edinburgh-based Rebus - a detective very much in the Marlowe mould - zoom up the bestseller list like new releases by The Beatles used to assail the pop charts.

Every week, it seems, television raids crime's larder, in search of a successor to Morse or Frost or Wexford or Dalziel and Pascoe. Come 9pm it is hard to avoid a body being dissected or a corpse in a state of decomposition. If you see someone taking their dog for a walk you can be sure that something unsavoury is about to be discovered in the undergrowth. The latest series is Wire In The Blood, featuring Robson Green as Dr Tony Hill, Val McDermid's clinical psychologist. "What makes Wire In The Blood unusual TV," wrote the Times's critic, "is that it is so gruesome."

In fact, Wire In The Blood offers pretty standard fare. It has a dash of humour, a dysfunctional sleuth, a serial killer and lots of jargon. All the cliches are intact. Taggart, too, is back, with its unfathomable plots and a cast of peely-wally Glaswegians. Whenever the pace flags up pops another "boady", while poor Blythe Duff continues to look as if she's just been gazumped at the bingo. Rays of sunshine are rare. Yet still we watch, as if hypnotised, hoping against hope we'll be surprised.

But murder isn't like that. Like evil, as Hannah Arendt said, it is banal. It is also, from the point of view of the crime writer, a challenge to find a fresh way of saying what is essentially the same thing. Bookshops testify to their ingenuity. Where once crime novels were obligatorily set in English villages or country houses, now they crop up everywhere, like alternative guidebooks. Italy, for example, seems particularly to appeal to crime writers - from Donna Leon, who lives in Venice, to Magdalen Nabb who surveys the grimier side of Florence from her roof garden in San Spirito. Nabb's new mystery, Some Bitter Taste, featuring the myopic Marshall Guarnaccia on the trail of an Albanian prostitution ring, is published next month. Nabb says she aims to describe "a very secret city. Walk down any residential street and you have no idea what's going on behind those blank walls." The latest fashionable location for crime is Scandinavia, where Henning Mankell and Karin Fossum are the names to look out for. The latter's cop is Inspector Sejer, "a tough, no- nonsense policeman whose own life has been tinged by sadness".

The theme may remain the same but the variations are apparently infinite. You can have crime and cooking, as dished up by Anthony Bourdain. Or crime and football, as offered by Steve Bruce, the former Manchester United player. Indeed, crime writing attracts almost everyone who thinks they have a book in them, including jockeys, politicians, former policemen and civil servants. Moreover, books can be set in the present or, in the case of Alanna Knight's series featuring Jeremy Faro, Victorian times, or - as in Ellis Peter's Brother Cadfael's chronicles - a 12th century Benedictine abbey. Detectives can be hard-boiled, soft-centred, scrambled- brained or gamekeepers turned poachers. Mix and match as required.

All of which, as Chandler intimated, can offer amusement but it is hard to detect any authenthic sense of novelty. "The detective story, for a variety of reasons, can seldom be promoted. It is usually about murder and hence lacks the element of uplift. Murder, which is a frustration of the individual and hence a frustration of the race, may have, and in fact has, a good deal of sociological implication. But it has been going on too long for it to be news."

Chandler himself must bear some responsibility for its passe- ness. Before Hammett and he came along, the murder mystery bore little relation to real life. For most people, it seemed a far cry from their own experience. Murder, if you believed the so-called Queens of Crime - Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L Sayers, Josephine Tey - happened elsewhere, to others.

They came to prominence between the two world wars, in what is known as the "golden age" of crime fiction, in which solutions hinged on the clockwork arrival of trains and an undeviating adherence to etiquette. Murder in the 1930s was more of a parlour game than the ultimate crime. There was no place for serial killers, child abusers or drug-crazed psychopaths behind the twitching curtains and rose gardens of shire England.

Nor did any of those "Queens" aspire to writing literature. As Chandler said: "It was second-grade literature because it was not about the things that could make first-grade literature. If it started out to be about real people they must very soon do unreal things in order to form the artificial pattern required by the plot. When they did unreal things, they ceased to be real themselves. They became puppets and cardboard lovers and papier mche villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility."

There's no doubt who he had in mind: Hercule Poirot, with his excruciating English and greasy moustache; Miss Marple, whose debut case came when she was past pensionable age; and Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey who "walked in, complete with spats" to his creator's imagination. Murder followed them around like the flu and, like considerate guests, they obligingly cleaned up the mess before they moved on, leaving the impression that all was well, when in real life it is anything but. Murders may be solved but their legacy is indelible. In the genre's heyday, however, murder was not primarily a crime against an individual but an affront to society: an embarrassment, like a domestic made pregnant by the lord of the manor.

When it came, the change was dramatic and violent. Its perpetrator was Dashiell Hammett who, said Chandler, took murder "out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley". Unlike his British counterparts, Hammett, who was born in Maryland in 1894, really knew what he was writing about, having worked for the Pinkerton detective agency, his duties included strike-breaking. Hammett, says Sara Paretsky, creator of the wise-cracking VI Warshawski, didn't create the hard-boiled detective, but he created "the creature that everyone else imitates: the man who exposes himself not just to danger, but to police mistrust, who operates not with the remote 'little grey cells' of Hercule Poirot, but with a passionate engagement with the world, a loner whose triumphs are always tinged with loss".

At a stroke, Hammett knocked on the head the notion of the amateur, unpaid sleuth. In The Maltese Falcon the detective is Sam Spade, who has an affair with the wife of his partner and who is wary of almost everyone. He had no original, said Hammett, "he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few in their cockier moments thought they approached. He wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anyone he comes into contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client."

Hammett's prototype is with us still, stalking those anarchic streets pockmarked with chewing gum, in whose battered doorways linger pimps and pushers, hookers and muggers. He is there in Rankin's Rebus, Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins and Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen. He is lurking, too, in William McIlvanney's Laidlaw, in the spiky novels of Denise Mina and Louise Welsh, and in the jungle- beat prose of James Ellroy.

It is testimony to Hammett's talent that his work, and that of Chandler, continues to be so influential. But it may also point to the inherent limitations of the genre over which they continue to tower. Solving crimes may no longer be the preserve of the likes of Sherlock Holmes but the more prosaic it has become, the more "real" it is, the more it has come to depend on dogged police work and breakthroughs in science, the less interesting it is as an artform. These days only the most partisan critic would argue that a crime novel could be a credible winner of the Booker Prize. Crime pays, but it does not repay re-reading. Sadly, what Chandler said 50 or so years ago remains true today. "There are no 'classics' of crime and detection."

Taggart is on Wednesdays at 9pm, Wire In The Blood is on Thursdays at 9pm, both on Scottish The Hound Of The Baskervilles will screen on BBC1 over the Christmas period

Copyright 2002 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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