In the late 1940s well-known British author and critic Evelyn Waugh hailed Raymond Chandler as America's "greatest living writer." Poet W. H. Auden stated that Chandler's mystery novels "should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art." Chandler himself once observed that it was not he but rather his colleague Dashiell Hammett who had taken murder "out of the Venetian case and dropped it into the alley." Perhaps, but it was Chandler who dusted it off, and, in the process of creating his Philip Marlowe character, elevated the literary genre of the hard-boiled detective story into a uniquely American art form. Writing in Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, T. R. Steiner has observed that "No earlier hardboiled writer had presented such vivid evocative images of city life and of nature. Although writers like Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, and Hammett had been developing a trenchant comic American written lingo, Chandler intensified and further stylized it, particularly with the comic similes and litotes that became trademarks of his style.
