>>5
By the way, thanks for that link - unfortunately, Chandler seems (in which he is certainly not alone) to have misunderstood Bentley's purpose in Trent's Last Case (1913), which was precisely to caricature in a sense, and to subvert, the form as it existed in his day; to write, in his own words, "not so much a detective story as an exposure of detective stories" against the studied eccentricity and extraordinariness of detectives, and the seriousness with which the genre took itself - though in so doing he provided the template of the "country house" mysteries of Sayers, Christie, Allingham, and others of the English "Golden Age".
Overall, Chandler's essay is a programme statement - a criticism of that which Chandler found inadequate in a style of genre fiction, and against which he and others reacted. To a degree it is also a document of its time (but criticizing the writing of a previous, pre-war, world) and of its place (American, not English). It is also worth observing that some of the English writers were themselves aware of the artificiality of the genre and its conventions - look at some of Christie's comments on how she came up with Poirot, or at her character Ariadne Oliver; and consider that even Conan Doyle tired of Holmes, and tried to kill him off at the Reichenbach falls, but gave in to popular demand and resurrected him.
And realism, social, or indeed criminal, is of course itself a style; that has since Hammett and Chandler itself become the stock in trade of less good writers. This is to say nothing against Chandler or his style, but only that what he writes is clearly motivated by specific attitudes and differences in matters of style, taste, interests, and literary concern.