The Simple Art of Murder is the title of several quasi-connected publications by hard-boiled detective fiction author Raymond Chandler:
The first, and arguably best-known, is a critical essay on detective fiction, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1944. A revised, expanded version was included in Howard Haycraft's 1946 anthology The Art of the Mystery Story.
The second is a separate, shorter essay, mostly describing Chandler's personal experiences writing for pulp magazines, originally published in Saturday Review of Literature, April 15, 1950.
The third is a short story collection, also originally published in 1950 (by Houghton Mifflin Co.), which contains eight of Chandler's stories pre-dating his first novel The Big Sleep, that he wanted remembered.
While first editions of this collection feature an abridgement of the Saturday essay as an introduction and the Atlantic essay as an afterword, later editions tend to feature the Atlantic essay as the introduction and relegate the Saturday essay to other collections, most commonly Trouble Is My Business.
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