The high window

204 pages

English language

Published Sept. 10, 1976 by Vintage Books.

ISBN:
978-0-394-72141-5
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4 stars (30 reviews)

Fast-talking, trouble-seeking private eye Philip Marlowe is a different kind of detective: a moral man in an amoral world. California in the 1940s and 1950s is as beautiful as a ripe fruit and rotten to the core, and Marlowe must struggle to retain his integrity amidst the corruption he encounters daily. In The High Window, Marlowe starts out on the trail of a single stolen coin and ends up knee-deep in bodies. His client, a dried-up husk of a woman, wants him to recover a rare gold coin called a Brasher Doubloon, missing from her late husband’s collection. That’s the simple part. But Marlowe finds that everyone who handles the coin suffers a run of very bad luck: they always end up dead. If Marlowe doesn’t wrap this one up fast, he’s going to end up in jail—or worse, in a box in the ground. Starring Toby Stephens, this thrilling …

23 editions

reviewed The High Window by Raymond Chandler (Vintage crime/Black Lizard)

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4 stars

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, …

Review of 'The high window' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

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 …

reviewed The High Window by Raymond Chandler (Vintage crime/Black Lizard)

Review of 'The High Window' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

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 -- …

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Subjects

  • Marlowe, Philip (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
  • Private investigators -- California -- Los Angeles -- Fiction
  • Los Angeles (Calif.) -- Fiction