Damn, what fine prose.

Sometimes funny, mostly wry and sarcastic, this noir really ought to be on the top of any fan list. So much of our modern UF series takes all its cue from books like this.

The racism angle is hardly at play here, considering that this came out in 1942, instead focusing on the murder and mystery and the missing rare coin.

Why read it? Because of the damn prose. It's sharp, light, gritty, and you have this feeling like it might, at any point, sucker-punch you or cover you with kisses. Or in this case, make you queasy with the kind of learned helplessness that comes with victims of long abuse.

Frankly, I would have been perfectly a-OK if Marlowe did a bit of murder, but what really surprised me was the kind of subtlety and decision that went on in these pages.

And oddly, I had the impression that Marlowe was pulling a Poirot by the end. At least, that was the impression. It almost fooled me, too. :)

It was good, but somehow not as good as the memory of the thing, like revisiting the bar where you'd proposed to your ex-wife.

Me ha entretenido pero nada del otro mundo.
Había leído mucho sobre este escritor de novela negra y me animé a comprar un par de obras suyas. De momento está no me ha gustado demasiado, ya que no me ha mantenido con ganas de saber más, que es lo mínimo que pido cuando leo este tipo de novelas.
Muchos personajes y solo dos o tres merecen la pena. No sé, esperaba más y mejor. Otra vez será.

She saw the cut glass decanter, took the stopper out, poured herself a drink and tossed it down with a quick flip of the wrist.
“You’re a man named Marlowe?” she asked, looking at me. She put her hips against the end of the desk and crossed her ankles.
I said I was a man named Marlowe.
“By and large,” she said, “I am quite sure I am not going to like you one damn little bit. So speak your piece and drift away.”

It’s a hard-boiled world out there, and a man named Marlowe must go down into its sewers in his pursuit of what we can probably name “The Mystery of the Brasher Doubloon”. In an opening scene that induces in the reader familiar with Chandler’s novels a strong feeling of deja-vu, Marlowe is called to an opulent mansion by a cranky old person of feeble health and given an easy job : not to find a missing young woman, but to track down a missing, very rare and precious gold coin.

All I knew about the people was that they were a Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock and family and that she wanted to hire a nice clean private detective who wouldn’t drop cigar ashes on the floor and never carried more than one gun.

What she gets instead is “Phil Marlowe. The shop-soiled Galahad.” , the disillusioned gumshoe with the sharp eye and the whiplash repartee. Marlowe smells a rat right from the start, but the rent must be paid and so he sets out to the mean streets, where heavy gamblers are slapping their moes, suave funeral directors manage the crime in the neighborhood, cops are only too willing to frame you for murder, young upstart detectives get chewed on as appetizers by the local sharks, clues lead from rundown dental businesses to posh and illegal gambling dens, and beautiful starlets are as trustworthy as hungry hyenas.

Chandler didn’t get to the top of my noir catalogue for his convoluted and improbable plot twists. It was always, right from the first page I read back in my school day, all about atitude and style. I haven’t revisited his dark universe recently, fearing my youthful enthusiasm will not survive a more critical view, but I discovered instead that the thrill is still there, and that the lyrical side of Marlowe is today even more appealing than his tough guy delivery:

Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets. They are all rooming houses now, their parquetry floors are scratched and worn through the once glossy finish and the wide sweeping staircases are dark with time and with cheap varnish laid on over generations of dirt. In the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun, and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles.
[...]
Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them.

No other crime writer has been able to replicate these soul damning similes or to match the sarcastic commentary on the predatory world the private detective must navigate, while keeping true to his inner sense of justice. Even when not firing from all cylinders, like in the case of the present novel, Chandler is still in a league of his own . He can make even a grocery list or a bland description of his office sound like poetry:

Three hard chairs and a swivel chair, flat desk with a glass top, five green filing cases, three of them full of nothing, a calendar and a framed license bond on the wall, a phone, a washbowl in a stained wood cupboard, a hatrack, a carpet that was just something on the floor, and two open windows with net curtains that puckered in and out like the lips of a toothless old man sleeping.
The same stuff I had had last year, and the year before that. Not beautiful, not gay, but better than a tent on the beach.

I am pretty sure I will not remember much of the plot five years from now, which might actually be a bonus, since I can re-read the novel and still enjoy some surprises – like why is the title referring to a window, when the mission is about a gold coin?  because there are actually three or four separate crimes that get tangled together, one of them decades old  . I may also forget some of Marlowe’s mannerisms and habits, and be again surprised that he smokes a pipe instead of cigarettes, and that he would rather play chess by himself at home than drink every night in a bar. What I would most like to remember are a few more of the lines from this novel, so here are the last bookmarks I made:

-ta commentary on the Agatha Christie style of crime novel and  a reversal of stated expectations as Marlowe lets the main suspect escape on condition that he releases a young girl who was brainwashed into thinking she is a murderer. This plays right into the lone wolf justiciary image of Marlowe, who would rather bend the rules to help those in need than blindly apply the law

“All right,” he said wearily. “Get on with it. I have a feeling you are going to be very brilliant. Remorseless flow of logic and intuition and all that rot. Just like a detective in a book.”
“Sure. Taking the evidence piece by piece, putting it all together in a neat pattern, sneaking in an odd bit I had on my hip here and there, analyzing the motives and characters and making them out to be quite different from what anybody – or I myself for that matter – thought them to be up to this golden moment – and finally making a sort of world-weary pounce on the least promising suspect.”

-ttwo examples of the fast dialogue that sound just like those classic black and white movies from the forties:

“Don’t get me sore at you,” the carroty man said briefly.
“That would bother me like two percent of nothing at all”
-- -- --
“Mr Grandy, could you use a five dollar bill – not as a bribe in any sense, but as a token of esteem from a sincere friend?”
“Son, I could use a five dollar bill so rough Abe Lincoln’s whiskers would be all lathered up with sweat.”

-tand a final image to take home and to cherish like one of those haiku gems:

The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don’t find.

Pitiless mothers, weak-willed sons, Chandler's archetypal noir protagonist, you can't fault a fellow for seeking literary comfort in these dark times.

Update: Above still stands.

Some years ago I came across a critic who said that Raymond Chandler wrote like a fallen angel. I wish I could remember his name because I think that's a pretty good description of Chandler's writing. An angel because of the quality of the writing itself. A fallen angel because of the gritty subjects and characters about whom he wrote.

THE HIGH WINDOW is no exception. Vintage Chandler doing what he did best.

2.5 stars only
The first half was slow and very uneven, but the second half picked up the pace with a nice rhythm .... until the pages of info-dump of "what really happened' by Marlowe. This could have been peppered throughout the book for far more enjoyable reading. My least favourite Marlowe so far, even worse than Farewell, My Lovely

As usual with my reviews, please first read the publisher’s blurb/summary of the book. Thank you.


Brasher Dubloons

Marlowe chases Mrs Murdock's Brasher Dubloon and gets entangled in a highly improbable timing of events. In the first half-book, I felt manipulated, which I hate. Too many coincidences of timing and place, with prose lacking much life or tension. Just a laundry list recipe, leavened by some shallow characterisations.

The second half comes a bit more alive with witty reparté between Marlowe and the cops, then between Marlowe and Morny. Unfortunately this does not last. There are more unlikely coincidences, plot-driven characters, and an over-clever ending driven by a laughably unlikely photograph, never explained.

Throughout, there's precious little snappy dialogue or philosopher-detective quotataions.



There were two moments of very surprising charity by the hard-boiled Marlowe, which did make him far more human, less of Don Quixoté and more of Sir Galahad.

I sighed, retrieved the envelope, wrote its name and address on a fresh one, folded a dollar bill into a sheet of paper and wrote on it: "This is positively the last contribution." I signed my name, sealed the envelope, stuck a stamp on it and poured another drink.


Pinkerton's Detectives

I found the rhythm of this book to be forced until about halfway, as if Chandler were imitating himself, trying too hard, and then the rhythm of the story becomes more natural and alive and interesting.

Some quotes

She let me get to the door before she growled at my back: "You don't like me very well, do you?"
I turned to grin back at her with my hand on the knob. "Does anybody?"

This is by far the best quote of the entire book -
After a moment I pushed my chair back and went over to the french windows. I opened the screen and stepped out on to the porch. The night was all around, soft and quiet. The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don't find.


.

Chandler believed, first, that he "chose" to be a writer as some people "choose" to be a waiter or a janitor, second, that he "became" a writer by studying "Black Mask" and the other pulps and simply imitating them (more on that below), and third, that the results were not make-work as they should have been, but serious literature, on a par with Hammett if not one better.

Chandler spent a boozy couple of years tearing the stories in the pulps (which he always maintained a healthy disdain for in his correspondence) to pieces and then attempting to put them together again. He wrote out summaries of what went on in the story and then rewrote the story from the summary, in his own words. Sometimes, the results were good. Sometimes, the results were not good. Good or bad, they never seemed to make much sense, though-- the stories had lost the glue that was holding them together, somehow, as though it weren't what happened that was important, but how it was told. All of this carries through to the work that Chandler would call his own.

Even though he was working with structure and planning, the elements of plot, Chander clearly learned nothing about either. He definitely learned from his mistakes-- it wasn't the plot that mattered: he could lose the plot without letting the novel get out of hand. Character and language were the lynchpins; not only enough, but more than enough, to get him through the rough patches where the plot got away from him. This is the lesson of the creative writing workshop-- to let the plot get away from you, to let the story "write itself." Chandler evidently had not read much Poe, and was on record as hating Agatha Christie.

Chandler's novels are cannibalizations (his own word) of short stories he was working on during that long apprenticeship. Somehow, he never subsequently came up with a new plot. He found he didn't need to, just so long as he kept shuffling his little deck over and over again. Different parts of the same story wind up in The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, for instance. There are certain similarities in  and The Lady in the Lake, enough to make you wonder if you aren't reading the same book again. The High Window steals from its immediate predecessor, Farewell, My Lovely, but that is as much to say that it steals from The Big Sleep, and to say it bears certain similarities to . They were all written in the same four-year period, and it shows.

All that said, The High Window and the novel that followed it, The Lady in the Lake, are the strongest of the bunch, plot-wise. There is a sense of purpose in the structure that is definitely lacking in the other novels. They read much more like traditional mysteries for that reason, and this might account for the fact that Chandler fans usually rate the other novels higher. Nobody hipped to Chandler reads the guy for his plots-- to do so is to invite boredom or frustration. So when it becomes the focus of the novel, the novel suffers. This one suffered.

Chandler escribe frases rápidas y cortas en primera persona. Como si viéramos la novela por TV. Los diálogos son filosos, con ingenio e ironía.

El detective Marlow es heredero de lo que dejo Hammett pero con una construcción más compleja. A su vez, ha influido en varios autores posteriores. Marlow es el Harry Bosch de los 50´s por ejemplo

La escuela negra norteamericana tiene a este escritor como uno de sus más grandes exponentes. Me quedan 4 novelas más de este autor que marcó el género.

THE HIGH WINDOW is the third Philip Marlowe book by Raymond Chandler. I admit to being put off by FAREWELL MY LOVELY due to the racism displayed by our protagonist, even though it seemed like he was attempting to be sarcastic about it sometimes. This book, however, is a return to form as Philip is hired by an old wealthy matron to find a stolen Colonial American coin that may have been stolen by her daughter-in-law.

There's the usual twists and turns throughout the book and Philip makes some questionable decisions regarding the justice involved but that helps the story in the long run. I think I enjoyed most the fact that Philip's employ ABSOLUTELY HATES HIM and it leads to a lot of comedic scenes between the two. Philip won't take anyone's disrespect and can't be browbeaten and Mrs. Murdock can't help BUT verbally attack people who defy her or show sass.

The only reason I'm giving this four stars instead of five is because I found the first half a little slow--which may also just be my own fault for trying to start it during intermission of Peter Grimes (although I also binge-read Mrs. Dalloway in the green room during tech week, so who even knows?). I read the second half in one sitting with a bowl of popcorn, so I figure it evens out.

Anyway. This is the kind of book where it almost doesn't matter what the solution to the mystery turns out to be, because the writing is so spectacular. I went into this book knowing the "hardboiled vocabulary" of Raymond Chandler/Dashiell Hammett/et al, but I was delighted by Chandler's powers of description, sentences like "She had eyes like strange sins." "A tall fine-looking man in a gray suit cut by an angel suddenly stood up from a small table by the wall..." (Those are both from the same page of the book.) . The descriptions of the characters were both completely original and totally apt--that is, I'd never read anybody described that way, but I knew immediately what kind of person this character was, and what they looked like.

It's really more a psychological thriller than a whodunit; we do indeed find out who committed all of the crimes (murder, fraud, blackmail), but the most interesting reveal turns out to be one of psychological torture and blackmail. Brilliant plotting, a true slow burn of a mystery.

Whenever I review one of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels I feel like I should be doing it with a half-bottle of rye on the desk next to the cigarette burning in an ashtray with my fedora pushed back on my head. But I quit smoking years ago, and I don’t bounce back from hangovers quite the way I used to so I try not to chug whiskey from the bottle these days unless it‘s a dire emergency. Maybe I can still get the hat….

Marlowe gets hired by a ball-busting old bag who thinks that that the daughter-in-law she despises ran off with a valuable rare gold coin from her late husband’s collection. As usual Marlowe soon finds himself wrapped up in a mess including several murders as he is forced to preserve the confidentiality of a client he doesn’t like against cops pressing him for answers.

This was a Chandler I hadn’t read before, and I had a surprisingly hard time getting into it for some reason. After a while the lines like “From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet she looked something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.’ got me into the groove, and while I wouldn’t call it the best Marlowe I’ve read, I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.

The thing that nudge it from a solid 3 stars to 4 was the ending. I loved that after Marlowe figured out the whole mess that he essentially just threw up his hands and decided to let it play out with only a few nudges from him while he focused on trying to help the one true victim.

It won’t be replacing The Big Sleep on my All-Time Greatest Detective Novel list, but it’s still Chandler in fine form.