Eighty years ago this month, in February 1946, the left-wing Tribune magazine published George Orwell’s essay ‘The Decline of the English Murder’ in which the writer identified a certain class of crime as most appealing to the tabloid-reading British public – and contrasted the ‘cosiness’ of this type of early 20th-century domestic murder with the brutal sadism of killings committed in Britain during the second world war. 

Two years previously, in 1944, while war still raged, in another essay entitled ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, Orwell specifically contrasted the ‘hard-boiled’ school of crime fiction with the gentlemanly Raffles stories of E.W. Hornung, featuring a well-mannered upper-crust jewel thief. He linked the noir fiction exemplified by James Hadley Chase in his novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish with the vicious totalitarianism that he lambasted in his political writing, noting: ‘It is important to notice that the cult of power is mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes.’ 

No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939) was the first novel in the immensely successful crime writing career of the British-born Hadley Chase. With a background in the book trade, Chase had noticed the increasing popularity of the hard-boiled school of US crime fiction in such novels as James M. Cain’s much filmed The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). Having equipped himself with a dictionary of US gangster slang, Chase sat down to write his own hard-boiled novel, deliberately avoiding the gentle cosiness that had been the hallmark of English crime writing during the golden........

© The Spectator