Crime fiction is an art form of absolute rarity, one that can feasibly claim to have universal appeal. The striking imagery, delicious cynicism, and wonderful, direct writing style offer some level of enjoyment for all consumers.

This last summer, I became utterly absorbed in crime fiction. Using my fascination with HBO’s The Wire as a springboard, I dove into different incarnations of the crime medium, watching films, conducting research, and above all else, reading the classic crime texts, like those written by the king of the genre: Mr. Raymond Chandler.

One key fact should be made clear: Chandler did not create noir fiction or the detective crime thriller. Noir fiction and its most defining characteristics had two major starting points in Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon and James M. Cain’s 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Both featured a hard-boiled, cynical leading man; the smoldering femme fatale; and the post-modernist edge of gloom, doom, and inevitability.

Chandler did not create the very genre in which he prospered; rather, he offered a superior example of it, fusing the noir of Cain with the detective of Hammett.

Chandler’s debut novel, The Big Sleep introduced legendary leading man Detective Philip Marlowe. Marlowe’s cunning cynicism is reminiscent of Cain’s protagonists, while his troubling opportunism make him a direct descendant of Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon. Marlowe’s general approach to crime, a combination of wry humor and tragicomic conscience, make him a unique entry in noir.

A surprising aspect of Chandler’s writing is its lush, classical composition. When we think noir, we think of the more modern, neo-noir examples of the genre, such as Frank Miller’s Sin City graphic novels or the work of James Ellroy.

That style of writing is well known: fragmented, choppy, compressed, and scant on adjectives, what we in the present day would call the “hard-boiled prose” of noir fiction. Chandler, though, writes with none of these characteristics, instead favoring a prose that is crisp, sharp and written with laser-like precision.

Meticulous details are exuded on rooms, articles of clothing, the physical features of characters, and the natural environment, the latter of which occurs as a frequent symbolism in Chandler’s work. Granted, the vocabulary is still tough and the prose aggressive in its sound, but it is damn well constructed.

As good as Chandler’s prose can be, though, his dialogue is among the sharpest I have ever read. Cutting like a knife, the repartee between Marlowe and his various clients/suspects/villains leaps off the page, hitting you with an immediacy that is both shocking in its frankness and startling in its construction. Consider, for example, this passage of dialogue from The Big Sleep:

She took the photo out and stood looking at it, just inside the door. “She has a beautiful little body, hasn’t she?”

“Uh-huh.”

She leaned a little towards me. “You ought to see mine,” she said gravely.

“Can it be arranged?”

She laughed suddenly and sharply and went halfway through the door, then turned her head to say coolly: “You’re as cold-blooded a beast as I ever met, Marlowe. Or can I call you Phil?”

“Sure.”

“You can call me Vivian.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Regan.”

“Oh, go to hell, Marlowe.” She went on out and didn’t look back.

This passage is sharp, precise, and very good. Furthermore, notice the clear sexual tension. Chandler’s dialogue falls into two camps—Marlowe’s altercations with his enemies, and his smoldering interactions with the femme-fatales of the California coast. While the former situations create suspense from their narrative hook, the latter scenarios are driven by a raw sexuality that is shockingly frank, especially considering Chandler’s novels were written in the squeaky-clean decades of the 1940s and 1950s.

Chandler was allowed this kind of freedom in his novels, where it was fairly common for Marlowe to sexually use female protagonists for information, and encounter other sexually related story arcs. One of the villains in The Big Sleep, for example, runs an underground circulation of pornographic magazines.

In Hollywood, however, censorship was much more strict. Double Indemnity, the 1940 film noir classic, was directed by Billy Wilder and scripted by Wilder and Chandler. While the script features all the aforementioned characteristics of Chandler’s world, it is much less frank in its sexuality, favoring innuendo and subtlety.

I mentioned symbolism earlier, and that aspect of Chandler’s writing has been, for me as least, its most remarkable aspect. Rainfall and water play an overarching, symbolic role in The Big Sleep, as wrong men and notorious women attempt to drown their guilty associations and wash away painful memories. In The Lady in the Lake, another fantastic Marlowe novel, water once again plays an important role, but so does the dark wilderness of a northern lake house resort, a play on the classic Puritan instinct of a frightening, haunted evil in unknown surroundings.

In its present form, popular crime fiction is dominated by the courtroom dramas of Law and Order and the tumultuous inner city of NYPD Blue. While not necessarily a bad thing, these are incarnations of the medium entirely devoid of the careful, literary elements featured in Chandler’s work, and in the end, the rich environments of the Marlowe universe offer a far more enriching rhetorical atmosphere than anything currently on NBC.

While these fantastical elements of Chandler’s novels justify their masterpiece standing, the one ultimate, lasting impression that his work leaves is that of true noir fiction, that of the road not taken. Noir fiction—true noir fiction, that is—takes us through a merry-go-round of human nature, exposing the dark underbelly of our species and reducing our actions to nothing more than animals in a cage, owned by a bleak and sadistic creator.

Our heroes are complicated train-wrecks of amoral behavior in an immoral world, driven by a strange inkling of morality yet succumbing to the same violent, avaricious behavior that cripples our modern world. Chandler writes unblinkingly of these truths, making us sadder, wiser, and more nuanced readers as a final result.