A very good, vivid, engaging, concisely written crime fiction novel about Private detective Philip Marlowe initially investigating the theft of a rare gold coin from the rich widow, Elizabeth Murdoch. Elizabeth Murdoch is a bitter old woman who suspects her daughter in law, Linda Conquest, stole the gold coin. During the investigation there are some murders and we learn about the death of Horace Bright from a high window eight years ago. Horace had been Elizabeth Murdoch’s husband.

Raymond Chandler fans will find this novel a very satisfying reading experience.

This book was first published in 1942.

[Random Read. 10, Mystery.]

In the third Philip Marlowe book, a bilious, dipsomaniac widow hires the sleuth to track down a very rare and valuable coin, which she believes has been stolen by her estranged daughter-in-law. He soon finds out that the job includes being accosted by the woman's ineffectual son, who still loves his wife, and by her timorous, neurotic secretary, for their own reasons. There's even another detective on the case, a cheerful but clumsy fellow, and two murders later Marlowe is checking in with the criminal classes to see what they have to say. He gets along with them better than he does the widow.

This is an astonishing feat of writing. These books aren't whodunits in the traditional sense; they aren't even noir, really. Marlowe is a genre unto itself, with original and self-assured writing that constructs a labyrinthine plot, but isn't really about the plot at all. A man confesses to a murder he didn't commit; later he'll recant and the murder will go cold and unsolved. Marlowe helps a lady in distress as far as he can. He also maybe helps another fellow get away with murder. Maybe the victim deserved it. Who's to say? Not Marlowe. "The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don't find."

And Justice For All

"The High Window" is the third book in Chandler's Philip Marlowe franchise. At this point in the series, an astute reader might just notice that Marlowe's clients are all rich folks in high-walled estates with numerous servants running cover for them. Perhaps they are the only ones who can afford his freight. And, perhaps the rich are different. They have such complicated problems hat ors almost impossible to untwist them. In another sense, though, Chandler, through Marlowe, is mocking the wealthy and their superior ways and all the dirty secrets buried in their past. You get that from the conversations Marlowe has with the lawn jockey ornament and from the flippant and non serious way he talks to his clients.

For all of Marlowe's cynical world-weary ways, he still believes in a kind of justice. He just finds it elusive in practice. There's too many deeds covered up, paid for, blackmailed. He wants so badly to believe he's Sir Galahad and he'll right all the wrongs, but he knows the rich and powerful get away with murder and he doesn't like it.

This one is as far from a shoot-em-up crime novel as you get. If anything, it's a puzzle that has to be a resolved.

"From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away"

"High Window is the third in the series and sees Philip Marlowe trying to track down a rare gold coin that was part of a collection left to a mean spirited and totally unpleasant "dried up husk of a woman" who treats her highly strung secretary horribly, by her late husband.

A bit more of Marlowe's character is fleshed out in this book. We see that that under his hard shell lurks a big heart as he goes out of his way to help and take care of a seemingly innocent, long-suffering character. There seemed an added confidence in the writing which is as rich as ever, with some terrific descriptions of people and places, but I found it harder to engage with this one as much as I had the others. Marlowe is as hard-boiled, wise-cracking as ever but otherwise there aren't any really likeable characters in it. There is also a pervading cynicism throughout, intended I believe, that began to wear a bit thin towards the end. Despite that this book is worth reading for Chandler's writing style alone.

For those of you who haven’t yet read Chandler, I’m here to tell you, the man can write. You read him for the words, for the atmosphere, not for plot. The High Window itself has nothing special to recommend it; it’s another instalment, one of many roughly equally as good. (First time around The Lady in the Lake was my favourite; my wife, who read them all this year, liked The Long Goodbye.) But it’s the one I re-read last week (cos it’s tight, short, cuts to the punch) so it’ll do.

The Belfont Building was eight stories of nothing in particular that had got itself pinched off between a large green and chromium cut-rate suit emporium and a three-storey and basement garage that made a noise like lion cages at feeding time. The small dark narrow lobby was as dirty as a chicken yard. The building directory had a lot of vacant space on it. [...] There were two open-grille elevators but only one seemed to be running and that not busy. An old man sat inside it slack-jawed and watery-eyed on a piece of folded burlap on top of a wooden stool. He looked as if he had been sitting there since the Civil War and had come out of that badly.

Thing is, Chandler (it seems) could churn out this stuff in his sleep. Every building’s a Belfont Building, or as vivid; every elevator operator a Civil War veteran, or as colourful; every character – from the “long-limbed languorous” showgirl (“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.”) to the “hard boy” (“A great long gallows of a man with a ravaged face and a haggard frozen right eye that had a clotted iris and the steady look of blindness.”) – as realised as can be for as long as their in sight. And here’s the clincher: “in sight”? So who’s watching? Probably the greatest near-non-entity hero/anti-hero short of Kafka’s K., P.I. Philip Marlowe, who puts the “eye” in private eye, whose gaze, thanks to British poet turned Black Mask pulp-magazine workhorse Raymond Chandler’s near-impossible deftness, is as sharp and resplendent as they come. How does he do it? Give this hard-bitten hard-boiled hard-drinking tough guy such eloquence? It’s something to see. And somehow, though (or because) we know virtually nothing about him, this fragile word-edifice that is Marlowe convinces us utterly. We love the guy. Who cares if the plots barely add up, or if by the time they do we’re past caring? When he talks tender to the femmes fatales I defy you (women especially – Chandler, against the odds, and despite low-grade ingrained chauvinism indicative of his times, is a ladies’ man) not to feel a shiver. It’s limited in range; but for the slightest tweaks it never changes, but for what it is it’s of a very high order, beyond Hammett (Chandler’s inventor), beyond genre, unique (despite the imitators) as few so-called genre writers ever have been. When at the end of The High Window he drives the innocent young woman victim to her parents’ home in Wichita and says goodbye, I almost teared up at his laconic summation:

I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.

Sure, maybe that’s all Chandler is, a poem he’s forgotten. But what a poem! It could break your heart.

I think I may have spoiled myself reading The Long Goodbye first, for I found the other Marlowe novels good but not quite as great. That is until The High Window. Some of it was reading the book straight through. Chandler is more compelling when fully immersed. Even with that in mind I liked this one best since The Long Goodbye. The plot was understandable but the twists were exciting. Dialogue was spot on and the story had Chandler's usual parade of Los Angles low-lifes, crazies, degenerates, and wisecrackers. Most of all, Marlowe was more human here than in most tales. He gets emotionally affected by what happens and even surprised at times. He comments on his loneliness here and there.

Marlowe Coins More Hardboiled Phrases
Review of the Random House Audio audiobook (2021) narrated by Scott Brick of the original Alfred A. Knopf hardcover edition (1942)

nThe white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don't find. - excerpt from The High Windown

nClass is a thing that has a way of dissolving rapidly in alcohol. - excerpt from The High Windown

Audible recently had another $5 Special Offer of one of the 2021 Raymond Chandler / Philip Marlowe audiobooks and I snapped it up immediately. The 2021 series has the great veteran audiobook narrator Scott Brick as its reader and he adopts the perfect cynical tone for the hardboiled detective. I had previously enjoyed Farewell, My Lovely (Philip Marlowe #2) (1940) from him as well. These share the spare cover art of the 1988 Vintage Crime / Black Lizard paperbacks, presumably due to a Random House publishing umbrella tie-in.

The High Window starts off with what seems like a simple straightforward case. Marlowe is hired to retrieve what is thought to be a stolen rare coin from the Murdock family collection. The chief suspect is the daughter-in-law of the officious widow Murdock, who is Marlowe's not very likeable client. The case quickly expands into murder, counterfeiting and blackmail though and Marlowe has to run the usual gauntlet of police suspicion, questionable femme fatales, criminal thugs and a damsel in distress before all is solved. The ending was actually rather sweet, which seems uncharacteristic for the cynical noir knight.


A photograph of a Brasher Doubloon (1787). In "The High Window", the value of a mint condition specimen is estimated at $10,000 dollars. In 2021, one of the same coins sold for $9.36 Million at auction. Image and background information sourced from Wikipedia

As expected, the narration by Scott Brick was excellent. Chapter intermissions were highlighted by the use of film noir-like jazz music to heighten the atmosphere.

Other Reviews
Not really a review, but author Lawrence Block wrote about the use of the Brasher Doubloon in The High Window for a numismatic magazine in 1964 and reproduces that article in this 2020 look back for Mystery Scene which can be read here.

Trivia and Links
The High Window has been adapted for film twice. First as Time to Kill (1942) dir. Herbert Leeds, with Philip Nolan in the lead role, whose character name was changed from Philip Marlowe to Michael Shayne to line up with a different series of detective films. The entire film can be seen on YouTube here.

The second film adaptation was as The Brasher Doubloon (1947) dir. John Brahm, with George Montgomery in the role of Philip Marlowe. The entire film can be seen on YouTube here.

The High Window is in the public domain in Canada and can be read online at Gutenberg Canada here.

Chandler doesn't add a lot of new merchandise to his stock, but what he carries should satisfy even the most discriminating reader of pulp crime fiction. The High Window (1942) is the third Philip Marlowe book. By now Chandler has learned to lace the plot with all the sorts of characters we've come to expect in the noir novel: nasty old rich people with some ugly secrets, suave night club owners ready to do business above or below board, smokey-throated showgirls on the run, silk-shirted gigolos, dumb blondes with small guns, brusque bartenders, and great big bodyguards. There's a nice assortment of crimes, too: theft, blackmail, forgery, and a handful of murders. Of course, the story is well lubricated with whiskey and liberally perfumed with cigar, cigarette, and pipe tobacco. For sheer seediness this is the grittiest of all of Chandler's novels. You may want to read it with gloves on.

Against this unseemly backdrop, Chandler uncloaks Marlowe's chivalry, revealing his hero's fundamental decency and generosity. And he develops Marlowe's cerebral side, showing him delving into psychoanalysis to get to the root of the mayhem and then cooling down by re-playing classic chess games.

As you've probably come to expect in a Chandler novel two, maybe three, plots intertwine and then resolve into one another. But don't bother with solving the crimes. These books really aren't Whodunits. They're perhaps closer to a series of character sketches, a rogues gallery of LA's worst (and a few of its finest), strung together by Marlowe's irresistible monologue. The plot helps propel your reading, but in the end you don't want to find out who committed the crimes so much as you want to know what's going to happen to Marlowe, and to the shy girl, and to the old man in the elevator, all of whom have become real characters, not just two-dimensional variables in an Agatha Christie style quasi-algebraic riddle.

Judging from the awkward handling of the denouement, it seems that even Chandler lost patience with the solution to the tangled web of mysteries he created. But the characters remain intriguing, even though, like Chandler, you may lose all interest in who really stole the doubloon.

I don't often re-read books. There are too many good books to be read. However, I will make occasional exceptions. Chandler is one of them. So imagine my surprise when I decided to re-read this one, only to find out, I had not read it before. It was like on of them special days ...like very special.

It's typical Chandler, no one to trust, bodies dropping everywhere and one child like and innocent young lady, only slightly unbalanced. Like I said, no one to trust.

This is not Raymond Chandler's best Philip Marlowe novel, but even as such, it is still worthwhile reading. On a job to retrieve a rare colonial American gold coin for an ill-tempered Pasadena widow, Marlowe keeps running across corpses -- so many that he calls in the police only on the first one, only to find himself in trouble with homicide investigators. For the other two stiffs, an anonymous phone call is all he'll do.

I have read The High Window twice before and still find myself liking it. Chandler has this goofy non-affair with his client's pathologically neurotic secretary, though being the knight-errant he is, all he gets out of it is a pat on the back -- by himself.

Describing a police interrogation room, Chandler writes:

The room had that remote, heartless, not quite dirty, not quite clean, not quite human smell that such rooms always have. Give a police department a brand new building and in three months all its rooms will smell like that. There must be something symbolic in it.

In this novel, we also see more scenes of Marlow at his apartment, including these quiet closing lines:

It was night. I went home and put my old house clothes on and set the chessmen out and mixed a drink and played over another [José Raul] Capablanca [world chess champion from Cuba in the 1920s]. It went fifty-nine moves. Beautiful cold remorseless chess, almost creepy in its silent implacability.

When it was done I listened at the open window for a while and smelled the night. Then I carried my glass out to the kitchen and rinsed it and filled it with ice water and stood at the sink sipping it and looking at my face in the mirror.

“You and Capablanca,” I said.

Do you wonder why I keep coming back?

I find myself enamored of the frumpy, bulky Philip Marlowe as he unlayers the evil workings of man below the surface of sun-drenched Los Angeles. This was written in 1942 and set in 1941, so we get an authentic and richly detailed portrait of a time and place that is long since gone, yet elements remain. The plain ordinariness of the first person narrator makes his discoveries all the more exciting, and Chandler does not overly romanticize his hero, which makes him unique amongst some of the peers of this genre. But you cannot help but love this truly principled man as he quietly goes about doing unheralded, unnoticed good things for the needy. The plot is fairly urbane, yet but I found myself chuckling and shaking my head in amazement at the quality of his character descriptions. His battle of wits with the cagey chief of police and his lackeys was priceless. Chandler is a one of a kind, and I’ll continue reading his stories in order till I finish this fine series.

The quotables drop like ripe fruit from nearly every page, here are but a few:

p. 8: “Her eyes behind the glasses were very large, cobalt blue with big irises and a vague expression. Both lids were tight so that the eyes had a slightly oriental look, or as if the skin of her face was naturally so tight that it stretched her eyes at the corners. The whole face had a sort of off-key neurotic charm that only needed some clever makeup to be striking.”

p. 59: “There were two open-grill elevators but only one seemed to be running and that not busy. An old man sat inside it slack-jawed and watery-eyed on a piece of folded burlap on top of a wooden stool. He looked as if he had been sitting there since the Civil war and had come out of that badly”

p. 135: “He had the sort of facet hat can turn from a polite simper to cold-blooded fury almost without moving a muscle”.

p. 151: Upon finally meeting up with the femme fatale: “’I don’t want to be too cynical, Marlowe. But you’d be surprised how many girls marry to find a home, especially girls whose arm muscles are all tired out fighting off the kind of optimists that come into these gin and glitter joints.’ ‘You had a home and you gave it up.’ ‘It got to be too dear. That port-sodden old fake made the bargain too tough. How do you like her for a client?’”

p. 169: Finally fed up with his paying client, the rich old shrew who says “I don’t like your tone. I don’t like your tone at all.” Now Marlow: “I don’t blame you,” I said. “I don’t like it myself. I don’t like anything. I don’t like this house or you or the air of repression in the joint, or the squeezed down face of the little girl or that twerp of a son you have, or this case or the truth I’m not told about it and the lies I am told about it and-“

Uvek moram da podsetim sebe da je Rejmond Čendler rodom bio Britanac jer je detektivski hardboiled tako američka stvar: Možda Čandlerovo bitansko obrazovanje i iskustvo emigranta u Americi može da objasni zašto je serijal o Filipu Marlou tako poseban. Niko nije tako kul kao Marlou – muževni i grubi amerikanac, ali razočarani romantični idealista, notorni alkoholičar, ali klasa u svakom smislu. Plus niko nije tako dobro udeljivao uvrede.

Visoki prozor je treći roman u serijalu, i u njemu se vidi koliko je romaneskna forma autoru omogućavala veći prostor da pokaže književni talenat. Dok su priče ostale pod teretom strogih žanrovskih konvencija pulp magazina, Čandler je u većoj formi mogao da isporuči i tvrdo kuvani detektivski narativ o korupciji, ubistvima, ucenama i tajnama, ali i da ga da po atmosferi, deskripciji i laganom hodu kroz mračni korozivni svet Los Anđelesa ogrezlom u tajkunskom novcu i kriminalu. Mnogo pre Handkea i Bodrijara, Čendler piše o zamagljenoj liniji između filma i stvarnosti, i američkoj realnosti koja želi da se predstavi većim filmom od filma. Kako Marlou, prevrnuvši očima, primećuje ovde ljudi govore replikama iz filmova. Stvarnost s one strane ogledala (ili platna), stoga, Marlou ne može uvek da jasno prepozna svoj a ni tuđ odraz u ogledalu. I volim što je kod Čendlera leš uvek važna i strašna stvar, a ne neki puki scenski predmet potreban da bi detektiv započeo istragu.