The only useful critics were those who knew what writing was all about...

"At the same time, he refused to be impressed by this [critical] attention - which earned him the jealousy and hatred of other mystery writers - because he thought most critics were simply illiterate. To him, The Memoirs of Hecate County proved that Edmund Wilson didn't know how to write, and he poked fun at the solemnity of Auden's remarks about the "criminal milieu." The only useful critics were those who knew what writing was all about. ... But the real development in Chandler is that he had grown suspicious of the kind of critical and intellectual magazines he had written for in his youth, because "they never achieve life, but only a distaste for other people's view of it. They have the intolerance of the very young and the anemia of closed rooms and too much midnight smoking.' "

- MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler. Just so.

Postscript: Chandler: "Here I am halfway through a Marlowe story and having a little fun (until I got stuck) and along comes this fellow Auden and tells me I am interested in writing serious studies of a criminal milieu. So now I look at everything I put down and say to myself, Remember, old boy, this has to be a study of a criminal milieu."