Together forever ...

... God and the Detectives | Books and Culture. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Proper mystery novels ... begin in the Garden of Eden. They start with the assumption of what Auden names (borrowing from Henry James) "the Great Good Place." Indeed, that's where hardboiled novels differ, for stories from the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler begin instead in "the Great Wrong Place," in a world fallen and corrupt. One result is, curiously, that a hardboiled detective can forgive or allow the criminal to escape. But the murderer in a classic Golden Age detective storymust be found and executed, just as the sinner must be expelled from Eden.