Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett began his literary career by announcing that he was going to take crime away from the English upper class and give it back to the common people, who were really good at it. Hammett didn’t say that English detective writers lacked merit. He merely decided to invent the hard-boiled school and forget about the lord of the manor and his idiotic relatives.

Raymond Chandler, an Englishman by lineage and education, agreed that the English had made a contribution to detective fiction. “The English may not always be the best writers in the world,” he wrote, “but they are incomparably the best dull writers.”