Simenon, by Pierre Assouline, translated by Jon Rothschild (Knopf, 447 pp., $32.50)

Raymond Chandler, by Tom Hiney (Atlantic Monthly Press, 320 pp., $12)

Mr. Lejeune is NR's longtime London correspondent.

COMPARE and contrast -- as examinations used to say before they came to consist of ticking little boxes -- Georges Simenon and Raymond Chandler. The immediate thing they have in common is two new biographies, both heavily researched, both rather badly written. Chandler in ...