The bar entrance was to the left. It was dusky and quiet and a bartender moved mothlike against the faint glitter of piled glassware. A tall handsome blond in a dress that looked like seawater sifted over with gold dust came out of the ladies room, touching up her lips and turned toward the arch, humming.
The sound of rhumba music came through the archway and she nodded her gold head in time to it, smiling. A short fat man with a red face and glittering eyes waited for her with a white wrap over his arm. He dug his thick fingers into her bare arm and leered up at her.
A check girl in peach-bloom chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins ...

Synonymous by now with the treacherous L.A. Underbelly he chronicled, Chandler was hardly a wide-eyed youth encountering his first acidic taste of noir as he wrote. By the time of The High Window, he'd emigrated to Europe and back again, after school in England and a swing around the continent in place of college. He would see trench warfare with a Canadian unit, dabble with a British Admiralty position, and go into flight training with the RAF. So when orchestrating his large and ramblingly tragic narratives, it is with a clear eye, and maybe only the slightest touch of a hangover, that Chandler sights up his most unbelievable character : LA itself.

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 fisnish 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 ...

The novels that make his reputation, Farewell My Lovely, The Big Sleep, The Lady In The Lake and The Long Goodbye as well as this one-- were to Chanlder some kind of cathartic penance, it would seem. Apt comparisons to Dante have been made, though Dante doesn't require any strings of clues or dubious alibis to proceed. In Chandler there is the sense that all the plot machinations in the universe are simply a dodge, something to distract the inquisitive from the main task at hand. Which is to say the revealing and documenting the million stories of the Damned, living in the various smoggy circles of The City Of The Angels.

Poisonous ennui, untrustworthy characters, twisted motives and unreliable ground rules are the markers of the midcentury noir-fiction style. The sense of foreboding and treachery in Chandler's style manages to convey the uneasiness with which Americans entered the modern world, set in the multi-cosm of LA, itself perched on seismic uncertainties moral and physical.

Noir seems to be the orphan child of the true-crime pulps, the onset of the coldwar, and the chilly modernism of the Ionesco and Beckett school. It is also the link between the thriller / murder story of the early part of the century, and the geopolitical espionage novel, to be seen in Ambler and Greene.

But time for all that fancy-schmancy stuff later, pal. When it's time, you gotta answer the bell .....

"I got a shoulder holster out of the desk and strapped it on and slipped a Colt .38 automatic into it, put on hat and coat, shut the windows again, put the whiskey away, clicked the lights off and had the office door unlatched when the phone rang.
The ringing bell had a sinister sound, for no reason of itself, but because of the ears to which it rang. I stood there braced and tense, lips tightly drawn back in a half grin. Beyond the closed window the neon lights glowed. The dead air didn't move. Outside the corridor was still. The bell rang in darkness, steady and strong.
I went back and leaned on the desk and answered. There was a click and a droning on the wire and beyond that nothing. I depressed the connection and stood there in the dark, leaning over, holding the phone with one hand and holding the flat riser on the pedestal down with the other. I didn't know what I was waitng for.
The phone rang again. I made a sound in my throat and put it to my ear again, not saying anything at all.
So we were there silent, both of us, miles apart maybe, each one holding a telephone and breathing and listening and hearing nothing, not even the breathing.
Then after what seemed a very long time there was the quiet remote whisper of a voice saying dimly, without any tone :
"Too bad for you, Marlowe."
Then the click again and the droning on the wire and I hung up and went back across the office, and out."

When I read my first Raymond Chandler book, The Long Goodbye, it blew my mind. WHAT IS THIS GENRE BOOK WITH LITERARY-LEVEL PROSE?! Is that allowed? I didn’t know that was allowed! Reading The Long Goodbye didn’t require any extra work to enjoy. It was just fun. But it had that decadent style and strong character voice too, those literary underpinnings that that made you want to take it with you to a local coffee shop, so all the cute girls would think you were really sophisticated and therefore affirm that your life has meaning by showering you with their valuable attention.

Alas, my dear friends, alas! My mind has become a deflated balloon and is no longer so easily exploded. Indeed, while I might once have aggressively asserted that Raymond Chandler was my favorite author - yeah, so neither he nor his character Philip Marlowe were paragons of social virtue, you wanna fight about it huh? I can get a brace of pistols off e-bay for cheap, and then we shoot each other til DEAD - that is now no longer the case.

It’s just like you wrote, old chap. The tragedy isn’t that the beautiful die young, it’s that they grow old and mean.

Problem is, I’ve read too much Chandler, and I’ve already read his best.

So High Window gives our jaded, wise-cracking private detective Mr. Marlowe a case involving a not-so-missing not-so-trophy wife; a stolen rare coin “The Brasher Doubloon”; a murder or two or three or four; a sordid secret from the past; and blah blah blah. It’s a Raymond Chandler book, do I really need to talk about the plot?

There’s going to be two apparently unrelated cases, but then it turns out they’re the same case. (btw, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, great film. Watch it. Better than Brick. Fight me if you disagree. I’ll get that brace of pistols on E-bay right now. I will put in a bid right this instant. Just let me know.). What’s more, in a past review, I decided that detective noir are best classified as masculine romances, in which the female characters obey strict tropes. Same deal. High Window’s got the slightly nefarious mother figure. Got the outwardly angelic doll with a SINISTER SECRET. Got the sluttish, brazen woman who turns out to be not that bad.

I’m not knocking on the formula here, not exactly. My primary point is that if detective noir is all about the female characters, then High Window comes out pretty poorly because its female characters aren’t that great. They’re not mysterious, life-affirming independent coffee shop material. They’re more like that mother whose will has finally been shattered and screams at her children in Walmart because they touched a thing. You know of what I speak, Gandalf.

Of all the female characters, though, the most important in detective noir is the LIGHTHOUSE:

Life is a perpetual storm, and our poor boat is constantly rocking, threatening to toss us into the cold, deep waters below. But in the distance, piercing through the mist and gloom, rises a pale slender tower, glowing bright, offering warmth and security… if only we can reach it. THE LIGHTHOUSE. A woman whose ethereal, ineffable, transcendent beauty promises liberation from the stormy uncertainties of life. An illusion, of course. Yet many a man has invested all his purpose and meaning and happiness in this LIGHTHOUSE, this woman. He builds her up on such a pedestal that she has no hope of ever fulfilling his vision of her...

The lighthouse is the heart of every noir and the greatest, final statement of a given work of noir is the truth of the lighthouse: Does she turn out to be a murderess? Does she turn out to be true? Or does she perish, destroyed by the machinations of this corrupt, stormy world?

The lighthouse in High Window isn’t weak so much as threadbare. She’s barely in it. In fact, NONE of the female characters are developed much - many of them get no more than two scenes.

All that criticism is fair, but ultimately, my tepid response boils down to novelty.

A couple years back, I read a study in which scientists attempted to quantify human response to novelty by having people listen to familiar chords/tunes/etc that were slowly tweaked into more novel strains. They discovered that people tend to dislike highly novel experiences. But they also grew bored with music that was too familiar. In other words, we like some novelty, but not too much novelty.

My first Chandlers landed just right on this novelty scale, but his particular formula has since skewed too strongly into familiarity. Even were I to have saved his best books - Long Goodbye; Big Sleep; Farewell, my Lovely - for last, I suspect my pleasure in the reading experience would still be reduced. Which makes me sad because it reminds me that the feeling of novelty does, itself, lose its novelty. Which is, I think, one component of death.

Not to end on that cheery note though, I still think Chandler has a great style, great prose, even in this one. It’s artificial but then so is all literature. It’s just, if you want to get the best Chandler, do not read The High Window. Go for The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye. They’re both great.

Ίσως, είναι το μυθιστόρημα του Τσάντλερ με την πιο ενδιαφέρουσα, μυστηριώδη και ιντριγκαδόρικη πλοκή, η οποία ξεφεύγει από τα στεγανά του 'hardboiled' λογοτεχνικού είδους. Εντυπωσιάζουν: το μέτρο, η ευστοχία και η οικονομία των διαλόγων, η ψυχαναλυτική διάθεση του συγγραφέα (αναφέρεται σε κάποιο σημείο στον Καρλ Γκούσταβ Γιούνγκ), και η ιπποτική στάση (για πρώτη φορά σε τέτοιο βαθμό) του Μάρλοου. Μπορεί όταν το ολοκλήρωσε ο Τσάντλερ να πίστευε ότι ήταν το πιο 'αδύναμο' βιβλίο του λόγω των παραπάνω λόγων, αλλά, πλέον, θα μπορούσε να θεωρηθεί ένα από τα πιο πρωτότυπα και καλύτερα συγγραφικά του δημιουργήματα.

Βαθμολογία: 4,5/5 ή 9/10.

Θα γράψω και εκτενέστερη κριτική (σίγουρα).

It has been many years since I read any of Raymond Chandler's Marlowe novels, but seeing The Brasher Doubloon (1947) over the weekend made me want to re-read the novel on which it was based. It was good to see Marlowe again, working for another high suspect and dysfunctional rich family (as in The Big Sleep). There is a family secretary named Merle Davis, who is afraid of being touched and who believes that, years before, she had murdered her employer's husband.

There are also the usual collection of crooked nightclub owners, cheap blackmailers, blowsy blondes, inept shamuses, tough homicide cops, and others. Through it all, Marlowe moves like a canny knight-errant, never quite lapsing into intimacy with the strangely cute Merle, but thinking about it nonetheless. Marlowe doesn't like to let himself get bedded by the lovely ladies, partly because he doesn't quite trust them with their revolvers secreted in their purses.

This is not one of the better Chandler novels: I think The Big Sleep and The Long Good-Bye are much better. But even relatively bad Chandler, such as Playback, is worth reading. Even though Marlowe lacks a few millimeters of being believable, he appeals to our better instincts -- and he is as smart as a whip.

I once almost got in to a fist fight with an acquaintance for suggesting that Dashiell Hammett was a better writer than Raymond Chandler. I was trying to rile him and was (kind of) joking. I've always preferred Hammett's style - more forthright, and yet intricate and layered. I will never forget the feeling of utter shock and breathlessness on reading Red Harvest in a single sitting; THIS was written in 1929??? Tarantino has nothing on this dude!


Rereading The High Window my mind isn't changed exactly, but I realise that perhaps I am jaded to Chandler through familiarity. His voice and style so absolutely defined through his fiction and screenwriting what we think of as noir - and the detective fiction and cinema that has come since - that it is easy to take him for granted, but the writing is simply superb. The plotting goes without saying, and the unexpected turn of metaphor is nonpareil. Of course, we have to give a pass to the sexism and homophobia as very much a product of its time, but this is superb, seminal, detective fiction. I would go so far as to say it transcends to become literature.

But i still think Hammett was better and am ready to roll up my sleeves.

The High Window is another excellent novel featuring Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled L.A. detective, Philip Marlowe, although to my mind it's not quite on a par with Chandler's masterpieces, The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye.

The case opens when a wealthy, twice-widowed Pasadena woman named Elizabeth Bright Murdock hires Marlowe to discreetly recover a valuable coin that has been stolen from her first's husband's collection. The client insists that her daughter-in-law, whom she hates, has taken the coin although she has no proof. The daughter-in-law has either left or been driven from the home. Mrs. Murdock wants Marlowe to quietly find the woman and get the coin back. The police are most certainly not to be involved.

All in all, this is a pretty strange household that also includes Mrs. Murdock's wimpy son and a severely repressed young secretary whom the widow treats like a doormat. Marlowe takes the case, although he pretty much knows from the git-go that everyone is lying to him, including his client.

Well of course they are, and before long poor Marlowe is up to his neck in a case that involves gambling, infidelity, blackmail and a small handful of murders. As is the case with any Raymond Chandler plot, it's all pretty confusing, although in the end, this one gets sorted out better than most.

As always, it's great fun to follow Marlowe through these tangled webs and, as always, the book is beautifully written in a style that has often been imitated but never matched. Raymond Chandler and his tattered detective were each one of a kind.

I was talking with a friend about detective noir mysteries of the 40's and how then it was a genre that was taking a chance, dealing with dark/tough subject matter and social issues, and that's why I find it appealing. It was somewhat like the beat generation writers were to the 60's, or what dope fiend memoirs are today. She agreed and said it was a venue that allowed the reader into a dark subculture that was intriguing, dangerous, and for the most part unattainable – and then she went one further and said, "like all those damn vampire books and movies that are so popular right now." TV shows like True Blood and book/movies like Twilight, where it's borderline necrophilia, outright violent, with heavy suggestions of danger. Or non-vampire stories such as cable shows like Breaking Bad where laws are definitely broken, but the characters are justified in doing so. Because for most people it's an escape into a fantasy that blurs morals, laws and values. They desire the forbidden fruit, they want the seduction, and then they want to go home and live their "normal" lives. Except for some it gets all messed up. They start dressing the part and living the dream. Norwegian Black Death metal bands killing each other and setting fire to churches. Kids in the suburbs going all gangster, getting "thug life" tats and capping domes. And I don't even want go off on that strange-ass Dungeons and Dragons weirdness of the 80's. But I'm getting a little off subject here – okay, a lot off. Yet what I'm trying to say is that what makes a writer like Raymond Chandler interesting is he used the genre to write books like The High Window - where he was able to broach sensitive subjects for the times - like mental health, child/sex abuse, racism, and extra curricular sex under the guise of a "detective mystery." It was a genre that allowed that. The subject matter was dark, and it didn't hold anything back. But it does leave me wondering if Chandler were a writer today what genre would he have chosen? Would he still be a mystery writer or would he be free to write fiction? (whatever that means) I tend to think he wouldn't have been confined to only writing detective stories.

Raymond Chandler is one of those writers you go back and re-read a lot, just to enjoy line after line of perfectly composed prose. Great writers find a way to make every sentence worth reading. The dialogue, of course, set a standard that people are still straining to match, but Chandler made little gems of even routine description: "He had a long narrow head packed with shabby cunning."
This one has Marlowe hired by a drunken, caustic old millionaire's widow to recover a valuable coin supposedly stolen by her spoiled son's wayward wife. Marlowe knows right away that he's being lied to, and the resulting complications include a couple of stiffs and and a run-in with a gambling boss and his one-eyed enforcer. There's also a tough, cynical cop, the aforementioned daughter-in-law, who has been around the block a couple of times, and minor characters galore, all precisely acid-etched. Here's the daughter-in-law's assessment of a man Marlowe asks her about: "He's a friend of Lois... One of these days he's apt to turn out to be a small quiet funeral too."
Sheer delight.

“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.” (Chp.32)

I don’t know about you, but I just love Raymond Chandler’s feisty private eye Philip Marlowe for sentences like the one above. And, of course, for sentences like these:

”From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.”

Can they really have been said by the same person? I think they sum up Marlowe quite well, sounding the inner contrasts of the seemingly hard-nosed and wisecracking, yet infinitely romantic and gentle detective. It’s definitely this latter side that emerges in Chandler’s third novel, The High Window, which may not be on a par with his classics but which, for the very reason of showing Marlowe as a pensive, considerate and highly moral knight errand proves a very good read. The plot is, once again, a rather awkward and jolty mess: Marlowe is hired by a dominant battle-axe of a widow by the name of Murdock, who suspects her daughter-in-law to have absconded with a valuable coin, the so-called Murdock Brasher. Mrs. Murdock’s aim is not only to have the coin retrieved but also to use the incident in a divorce suit against her daughter-in-law. What seems to be a simple case of theft very soon leaves Marlow knee-deep in dead bodies, but even the murder cases are not the main element of The High Window. The story will eventually centre a lot on Mrs. Murdock’s mousy secretary Merle Davis, who seems to be linked with the family by a mix of neuroses, instances of victimization and of worse things.

Of course, the only person who gets some depth in the course of the story is Marlowe himself, who seems to be particularly doubtful about his life, his job and the world in general but nevertheless clings on to his notions of what is right and what is wrong – even if this means manipulating evidence and holding out on the police. Most of the other participants in the story are stock characters, such as the jaded nightclub songstress, the namby-pamby boy, the ham-turned-gangster, his unfaithful, semi-slutty moll and the methodical cop with his somewhat explosive sidekick. Still, after reading its first two predecessors, The High Window will be enjoyable because it shows a less world-wise, almost vulnerable Marlowe, and maybe Marlowe, as well as Chandler’s amazing use of language, are the main attractions in these novels.

By the way, reading The High Window might also give you an idea why Chandler was not too pleased with good old Bogey starring as his private eye in The Big Sleep and why, instead, and unbelievably (at least to me) he preferred the less square-jawed Robert Montgomery. In this novel we have Marlowe play chess against himself, and even talk about Wuthering Heights and try to explain to a policeman what “Pepys shorthand” is. Now can you imagine Bogey doing all this?

Mini Review

Philip Marlowe is fast becoming my favorite detective of all time. It is unusual for a character to be so interesting and simultaneously the writing to be so vivid and entertaining that the author can describe him staring at a wall and still make it a worthwhile read; but Chandler's Marlowe fits such a bill. He is an idealist but not naive, witty without being juvenile, he is a cynic but his worldview is not so gloomy or bleak that it alienates any particular section of readers.

Noir tropes and quotable one liners galore but what pushes it to a 5 star instead of 4 is the plot. It is possibly among his most consistent and complex ones with little to no dependence on crazy coincidences that plagued some of his earlier books. Rating - 5/5.

Bello e senza fronzoli, che altro volere.

Good story, but I could have done without the musical fanfares at the end of each chapter.

I can see I will have to read more of the Philip Marlowe series, but possibly as e-books to avoid the music.