Raymond Chandler, in his "Introduction" to Trouble is My Business (1950), on the process by which, in the 1920s and 30s, "the popular mystery story shed its refined good manners and went native" when it emigrated from the English drawing rooms of the Golden Age to the emerging American hard-boiled pulp genre:A few unusual critics recognized this at the time, which is all one had any right to expect.
The average critic never recognizes an achievement when it happens. He explains it after it has become respectable.
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