The High Window

What a pleasure it's been to find an author that so consistently gives me exactly what I want and expect out of a detective noir.

While this is a third book in a series, there's no real continuity to worry about and absolutely holds up as a standalone entry. We got our barely-scraping-by protagonist in Philip Marlowe taking a job from a rich client who's adversarial from the jump. We got a huge cast of characters introduced in a frontloaded opening third of the story. And we got a couple of seemingly unrelated murders that all get pulled together in a complicated web of relationships. Set it in 1940's Los Angeles and give everyone old-timey vocabulary and you got a bona fide noir.

Will I remember every exact detail of this story a few months from now? Most certainly not, but I'll remember that I enjoyed my time with it, and that's good enough for me.

This novel is a bit bipolar reading it almost 80 years after it was written.

There are flashes of great hard-boiled prose in the work and the dialogue occasionally made me smile with how colorfully stilted it is (in a good, film noir way). In these stretches it's easy to see why Chandler was as influential on pop culture as he was.

I got thrown off more than a few times by just how detailed the main character, Marlowe, gets in describing locations and people - particularly women. I was baffled by some of the choices made to describe almost tangential things in great detail. Being written from the first person as the detective explains some of this terse but exhaustive note taking style, but I found myself skimming for some of the better turns of phrase.

There was also surprisingly little action in this novel. Marlowe discovers a lot by questioning, people come to him and point him at others, he finds dead bodies, etc. but he never really feels like he's in danger despite the presence of the usual heavies. There's a token fistfight that doesn't feel very realistically motivated, and all of the crime happens without Marlowe present. There's no sexual element either, no chemistry with any of the women. The result is Marlowe feels relatively passive, mostly just an agent to pursue leads, like a detached Agatha Christie protagonist, right up until he puts it all together.

In that way, I think the intervening 80 years of film noir has really sapped a lot from my enjoyment of this book. I was expecting gunplay and a sizzling femme fatale with creatively oblique dialogue but this novel is more akin to a morally ambiguous Poirot.

However, I have to give it some credit as the pulp fiction of its day. Like those Christie novels, this was intended to be short and to the point, to entertain for a while, and maybe not to provoke the sort of academic dissection more literary fiction might attempt. From that point of view I can appreciate this work like a 1942 version of a TV procedural... but I still feel like I got an episode of Dragnet when I was looking for Double Indemnity.

Worth reading for Chandler's verbal wit, which is wedded to Marlowe's noble-cynical sensibility and to his characterization, through dialogue, of a variety of social types. Chandler is interested in recreating spoken English as inflected by characters' ethnicity and class -- there are two, maybe three, Jewish characters, whose styles of speaking are differentiated ... I want to say faithfully, but others may find them to be offensively stereotyped.

At the same time, I was reading this in a kind of defensive cringe against the unselfconscious white male paternalism that underlies the racial and gender coding of the characterization. A running gag involving Marlowe's sympathy for a lawn jockey may, for white readers at the time (1942), have signaled a healthy liberal tolerance; today many of them will want to avert their eyes in embarrassment; and surely African American readers must've side-eyed that gag from the get-go.

But the biggest -- even lethal -- embarrassment is Merle Davis. The "neurotic" secretary of Marlowe's client, Merle is not so much a human being as a Hoffmanesque automaton acting out (in her doctor's term, "dramatizing") a script dictated by past trauma -- the cause of which, as spelled out in the book, is so implausible that I suspect self-censorship by the author or publisher. Merle (and her "treatment" by the Freudian Dr. Moss and Freudian-skeptic Marlowe) would make for a great case study in mid-century attitudes toward psychoanalysis and "hysteria." In a seemingly unrelated episode, while going through his mail Marlowe opens a solicitation from a handwriting analysis service promising to reveal the subject's psychological makeup according to both Freudian and Jungian principles. With characteristic ambivalence, Marlowe first rips up the enclosed reply envelope (preserving the uncanceled stamp), then gets a fresh envelope in which to return a dollar and an ironic message (which, as it is presumably handwritten, exposes Marlowe to psychoanalysis!). The episode has no apparent bearing on the plot, but it nevertheless provides a potential "window" into Marlowe's own self-dramatizing. (The lawn jockey gag is perhaps another "window," affording a prospect for analysis of Marlowe's encounter with Pop the elevator operator.)

How do you decide how many stars to assign to a book like this? As I wrote above, there were many times that I cringed with embarrassment at the book's misogyny and racism. To be honest, I'm docking two stars out of sympathy with women who have suffered sexual trauma and (I imagine) will take offense at the characterization of Merle Davis and at her treatment in the (well-meaning) hands of Moss and Marlowe. Merle Davis is a failure of imagination on Chandler's part -- she's a stale recycled trope, the woman doomed by sexual violence to a state of permanent childhood. Yet it's hardly a surprise that he fails -- Chandler is exercising his sympathies and his imagination within some very powerful cultural constraints. With those constraints in mind, The High Window is worth reading as a cultural artifact in addition to its merits discussed above.

Also, the overall construction seems tighter than The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely (I'm reading them in order).