The High Window: Raymond Chandler

This was Raymond Chandler's third novel, and it is the third I have read. There is no particular reason to read them in order. I suppose I have been doing that to follow how his writing style changes over time.

In The High Window, Marlowe is called in by a wealthy widow, Elizabeth Bright Murdock, because a coin in her late husband's coin collection is missing. She thinks that her daughter-in-law took it, and she wants Marlowe to find it. You would think that she could ask her son about it, but apparently no one in this family talks to anyone else. The coin that is missing is a Brasher Doubloon, in mint condition and very valuable.

I did not like this novel as much as the previous two in the series: The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. This is still an excellent book, it just doesn't match up to the first two he wrote. Marlowe is a wonderful character. But in both of the earlier novels I found other characters to like and sympathize with. In this one none of the characters were particularly sympathetic and we don't get to know them very well. There are a lot of characters, and they were hard to keep track of. However, the dialog is terrific, even if I didn't care for the characters.

The plot in The High Window was confusing (at least to me, other reviewers disagree), but that is nothing new for Chandler. By the end, however, what seemed like a mish-mash of really weird characters is explained, and the ending is satisfying. There are some good points made about being able to trust the police (or not), and he interacts with two policemen who are pretty good guys, although it is not immediately obvious. The story portrays the wealthy and elite of Los Angeles and those from the seamy side of the area. Philip Marlowe lives somewhere between.

The Foreward by Lawrence Clark Powell in The Raymond Chandler Omnibus talks about the representation of Los Angeles in literature and particularly the books of Raymond Chandler.

Raymond Chandler wrote with classical dispassion of a romantic and violent society. He was neither for nor against L.A.; his vision was not dazzled by the neons which rainbow the Southern California night. He had the X-ray eye that penetrates blacktop and fog (smog didn't come until the 1940's–Chandler's L.A. is of the two previous decades). He had the gift of tongue; he was a poet. Metaphors flowered for him in language suited to the exotic people and places he was describing with Flaubertian meticulousness. Chandler didn’t moralize, satirize, deplore, or lament; he saw, selected, and said, in language that lives.  The reader is left to his own conclusions about tlie morality of the Southern California milieu.

The inhabitants are all there to the life–garage men, room clerks, carhops, grifters, grafters and house dicks, the idle rich and their butlers, houseboys and chauffeurs–a marvelous menagerie of Southern Californians, differentiated in appearance and speech, pitilessly portrayed yet without malice. Chandler had lived among them most of his life–he was one of them, he and his alter ego, Philip Marlowe–and he memorialized their brutal and violent actions with redeeming compassion.

Where this novel does live up to the earlier promise of the two previous ones is in the beauty of the writing. I am not particularly fond of the metaphors and similes; sometimes they work for me, sometimes they fall flat. Regardless, his writing is superb.

There are two adaptations of this book. First it was made into a Mike Shayne movie with Lloyd Nolan, Time to Kill, in 1942. Later, George Montgomery starred in The Brasher Doubloon, in 1947. I haven't seen either of these, but I would love to.

See Also...

Reviews at A Crime is Afoot and Crime Segments.


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Publisher:   Ballantine Books, 1971. Orig. pub. 1942.
Cover art by Tom Adams.
Length:      204 pages
Format:      Paperback
Series:       Philip Marlowe, #3
Setting:      Los Angeles
Genre:       Mystery
Source:      I purchased my copies. The omnibus has been on my TBR for eight years.