Like all of Raymond Chandler’s novels, The High Window features private detective Philip Marlowe as first-person narrator reporting events unfolding as he attempts to crack a case in sun-soaked Los Angeles. I marvel at his perceptiveness and cleverness. Can anybody surpass Marlowe in his ability to see all the angles, to size people up, to catch all the clues, to ask the right questions, to crack wise at those times cracking wise is the wisest, to put the puzzle together so all the pieces fit in place? Maybe Sam Spade in the Maltese Falcon, but that's about it. Oh, clever Odysseus, who fooled the Cyclopes, who heard the song of the sirens and lived to tell the tale, Raymond Chandler gave you a rebirth as a private eye.For anybody unfamiliar with Chandler, here is a snatch of dialogue taking place in Marlowe's office when a member of a very rich family comes to speak with the detective:He looked me over without haste and without much pleasure. He blew some smoke delicately and spoke through it with a faint sneer."You're Marlowe?"I nodded."I'm a little disappointed," he said. "I rather expected something with dirty fingers.""Come inside," I said, "and you can be witty sitting down."I held the door for him and he strolled past me flicking cigarette ash on the floor with the middle nail of his free hand. He sat down . . . He leaned back in his chair with the smile of a bored aristocrat."All set?" I inquired. "Pulse and respiration normal?" You wouldn't like a cold towel on your head or anything."Through Marlowe, Chandler introduces us to a host of gangsters, crooks, con-artists, thugs, goons and their dames, who take turns planning, threatening and committing violence as if they were flesh-and-blood members of the weasel patrol from Toontown. Here is another bit of dialogue where Marlowe watches from behind a curtain as a shady nightclub manager speaks to his wife after they find his wife's boyfriend shot in the head:Silence. Then the sound of a blow. The woman wailed. She was hurt, terribly hurt. Hurt in the depths of her soul. She made it rather good."Look, angel," Morny snarled. "Don't feed me the ham. I've been in pictures. I'm a connoisseur of ham. Skip it. You're going to tell me how this was done if I have to drag you around the room by your hair. Now - did you wipe off the gun?"Philip Marlowe is not only an incredibly super-sharp observer, but he is also an intelligent, well-educated, highly ethical man. Two cases in point: when the name Heathcliff is mentioned, he knows the character is from Wuthering Heights and when someone shows him entries in a diary, he alludes to the diary of Samuel Pepys. This contrast between the crime and social grime of 1940s Los Angeles and the presence of Philip Marlow gives Chandler's work real abiding depth.There are hundreds of authors, some very good, who have written detective fiction or crime fiction. What sets Raymond Chandler apart is the polished literary language matching any American author, including the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, William Falkner. This is the prime reason I have included the above quotes and the reason I will end this review with another sparkling vintage Chandler quote, this one where Marlowe describes the woman he sees when being led by a tall, dark, olive skinned crook to the back yard of a suburban LA mansion:"A long-limbed languorous type of showgirl blond lay at her ease in one of the chairs, with her feet raised on a padded rest and a tall misted glass at her elbow, near a silver ice bucket and a Scotch bottle. She looked at us lazily as we came over the grass. 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. Her mouth was too wide, her eyes were too blue, her makeup was too vivid, the thin arch of her eyebrows was almost fantastic in its curve and spread, and the mascara was so thick on her eyelashes that they looked like miniature iron railings."
Raymond Chandler's prose style is up there with the greats. It's still hugely influential, incredibly important. None of his books fail to impress on those grounds. It is, of course, real hard to try to write like Raymond Chandler writes and pull it off. There are probably as many woeful Chandler copycats out there as there are woeful Hemingway copycats.The High Window isn't my favourite of the Marlowe books. That's mostly down to the plot, which is just okay, and doesn't really let Marlowe reach his full potential, or for that matter any interesting thematic threads.But just read:“The blond giggled and petted his face with her eyes.”"He had a long nose that would be into things."“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."“A small tongue played roguishly along her lips.”“Her eyes were as hard as the bricks in her front walk.”And now for a masterpiece of descriptive prose:“The lobby looked like a high-budget musical. A lot of light and glitter, a lot of scenery, a lot of clothes, a lot of sound, an all-star cast, and a plot with all the originality and drive of a split fingernail. Under the beautiful soft indirect lighting the walls seemed to go up forever and to be lost in soft lascivious stars that really twinkled. You could just manage to walk on the carpet without waders. At the back was a free-arched stairway with a chromium and white enamel gangway going up in wide shallow carpeted steps. At the entrance to the dining room a chubby captain of waiters stood negligently with a two-inch satin stripe on his pants and a bunch of gold-plated menus under his arm. He had the sort of face that can turn from a polite simper to cold-blooded fury almost without moving a muscle. The bar entrance was to the left. It was dusky and quiet and a bartender moved moth like 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 rumba 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. A cigarette girl came down the gangway. She wore an egret plume in her hair, enough clothes to hide behind a toothpick, one of her long beautiful naked legs was silver, and one was gold. She had the utterly disdainful expression of a dame who makes her dates by long distance. I went into the bar and sank into a leather bar seat packed with down. Glasses tinkled gently, lights glowed softly, there were quiet voices whispering of love, or ten per cent, or whatever they whisper about in a place like that. A tall fine-looking man in a gray suit cut by an angel suddenly stood up from a small table by the wall and walked over to the bar and started to curse one of the barmen. He cursed him in a loud clear voice for a long minute, calling him about nine names that are not usually mentioned by tall fine-looking men in well cut gray suits. Everybody stopped talking and looked at him quietly. His voice cut through the muted rumba music like a shovel through snow. The barman stood perfectly still, looking at the man. The barman had curly hair and a clear warm skin and wide-set careful eyes. He didn’t move or speak. The tall man stopped talking and stalked out of the bar. Everybody watched him out except the barman. The barman moved slowly along the bar to the end where I sat and stood looking away from me, with nothing in his face but pallor."
What do You think about The High Window (1988)?
I once read in a mystery readers' newsletter that one invariably favors either Chandler or Hammett, and that the minute difference in character between the two preferences is an unbridgeable gap. I started with Hammett, and expected much more than I got. It was brusque and brooding, but its brusqueness lacked refinement: it was not laconic but merely truncated.The brooding lacked the sardonic wryness which I had come to associate with crime fiction, and which I now find to be the flourished signature of Chandler, with his abstracted yet fitting metaphors. Chandler also misses the mark when it comes to laconic elegance, leaning more to the luridly painted scene.Both have that slow-burn plot that is only saved by the aid of an insider (and coincidentally, the delivery of a small box containing the macguffin). Hence, I wouldn't call the plotting tight, exactly, as it hinges on a kind of authorial intervention to keep it moving; but it does move.In the end, Chandler could have used a bit of Hammett's brusqueness, while Hammet could use a lot of Chandler's elegance, if you could call it elegance. The sort of elegance shown by a nondescript thug pulling and firing, killing without wasting a second bullet, and then disappearing into the wave of screaming, trampling patrons, leaving behind only a body amongst the broken glasses, spilled liquor, and ticket stubs. If there could be any elegance in a thing like that.But that newsletter was right. I find myself drawn to Chandler and scorning Hammett. As with most such contests, it all comes down to the commas, in the end. In Chandler, they're a shrug, a wistful moment: a recognition that whatever you're about to say isn't what you wanted to say. In Hammett they're a stutter before a restatement.Both show a recognition of something left unsaid, something sought for but in the end, something not found. That's the legacy of most crime novels: that even when you find what you were looking for, it doesn't change anything, and that need to look is still there.And when a man searches for that thing and fails to find it, I find him more charming if he shrugs instead of stutters.
—J.G. Keely
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.
—Jim
Had to laugh when I found reviews saying nobody ever reads Chandler for his plot. It's probably true, at least once you know what you're getting into. There are parts of the books where I have no idea what's going on but I'm still hanging on because the way he writes is so amazing. I think I say this in every review of his books, though. This one had some awesome phrases in it -- the description of Marlowe as a "shop-soiled Galahad" particularly struck me, and "women who should be young but have faces like stale beer".I actually found the character of Merle one of the most interesting things about this novel, though -- the attention paid to carefully building up her backstory and character. Structurally, I think this book is better than The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely -- although in all of them I've been able to keep a better grip on the plot than I'd expected of myself.I don't read Chandler to find out whodunnit, though. That's almost immaterial.
—Nikki
