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).