Category Archives: 10. Events

The High Window
by Raymond Chandler
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Philip Marlowe #3
Publication Date: August 17, 1942
Genre: noir
Pages: 272
ReRead?: Yes
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of crime, summer of noir

Fast-talking, trouble-seeking private eye Philip Marlowe is a different kind of detective: a moral man in an amoral world. California in the ’40s and ’50s 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 dramatisation by Robin Brooks retains all the wry humour of Chandler’s serpentine suspense novel. It was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 8 October 2011.

It felt like this is the point at which Chandler settled comfortably into his character and his style. He has a knack for scene setting, which shows in the opening paragraph

The house was on Dresden Avenue in the Oak Noll section of Pasadena, a big sold cool-looking house with burgundy brick walls, a terra cotta tile roof, and a white stone trim. The front windows were leaded downstairs and had a lot of rococo imitation stonework trimming around them.

From the front wall and its attendant flower bushes, a half acre of so of fine green lawn drifted in a gentl slope down to the street, passing on the way an enormous deodar around which it flowed like a cool green tide around a rock.

Marlowe has been called to the home of a wealthy widow to recover a valuable, and rare, coin: the Brasher doubloon. He is told by Mrs. Murdock, the widow, that it was stolen by her daughter-in-law, who absconded with the coin and her son’s heart. This is a very basic set up for what turns out to be a very complicated scheme that – as usual – ends in a series of sordid murders. He is told, severely, that he is not allowed to talk to anyone about the job, including the son. Mrs. Murdock has a young secretary, Merle, who will figure prominently in the story.

The son shows up at Marlowe’s office shortly after he leaves the house in Pasadena.

He didn’t curl his lip because it had been curled when he came in. “A private detective,” he said. “I never met one. A shifty business, one gathers. Keyhole peeping, raking up scandal, that sort of thing.”

“You here on business,” I asked him, “or just slumming?”

His smile was as faint at a fat lady at a fireman’s ball.

Chandler has a unique way with words, which excuses the fact that his plots are convoluted and thin. The High Window, like the prior two novels, is full of gold nugget language to excavate.

But, as well, Marlowe himself has become wholly convincing as a sort of a hero. Not an anti-hero, which has become ubiquitously, and sort of sadly in my opinion, popular in this nihlist age in which we live, but the real thing. Bashed about, a bit dented, but a real hero.

In this, he makes me think of Harry Bosch (or, more accurately, Harry Bosch makes me think of him) to the point that I wonder if Michael Connelly had Chandler’s LA and Marlowe himself in mind when he began writing his long-running series, which I have been reading for more than three decades. Bosch – who represents the uncorruptible side of law enforcement – has a credo – Everybody counts or nobody counts.

In Chandler’s LA, you count only if you count. If you are important or rich, or famous in some way. Marlowe swims in a sea of corruption, but maintains an integrity and a sense of honor that everyone around him seems to entirely lack. The government is corrupt. The police are corrupt. Everyone is beholden and bought and paid for by someone else. In talking to a police officer, he says:

Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine. Until you guys can be trusted everytime and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may – until that time comes, I have the right to listen to my conscience…

This is the conflict that has animated the Bosch series from the beginning, because Harry Bosch is a cop who can be trusted everytime and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may. And he has spent 20+ books at odds with the LAPD brass, which is less than worthy of this trust. From 1942 to 2025, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

“Phil Marlowe,” he said, “The shop-soiled Galahad.”

This was the last novel in my collection of “the early novels,” which also contained a bunch of the pulp stories. I am not a huge short story fan, so I may or may not circle back to read them at some point. Next up, though, is The Lady in the Lake, but first I’m going to branch out and read The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson.

Farewell, My Lovely
by Raymond Chandler
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Philip Marlowe #2
Publication Date: January 1, 1940
Genre: noir
Pages: 304
ReRead?: No
Project: summer of noir

Marlowe's about to give up on a completely routine case when he finds himself in the wrong place at the right time to get caught up in a murder that leads to a ring of jewel thieves, another murder, a fortune-teller, a couple more murders, and more corruption than your average graveyard.

The second book in Chandler’s Philip Marlowe series begins with a coincidental encounter between Marlowe and Moose Malloy, who has just been released from a stint in the Oregon State Penetentiary, where he did time for robbery. He is back in L.A., looking for his lady love, Velma, who used to be a torch singer, and for revenge on whoever it was who sold him out to the police.

He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes. From his outer breast pocket cascaded a show hankerchief of the same brilliant yellow as his tie. There were a couple of colored feathers tucked into the band of his hat, but he didn’t really need them. Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

Marlowe is there, checking out Florian, which used to be a white night club but has been taken over by the black community (Chandler uses a number of words for this community which are both unfamiliar and unquestionably offensive, and which I will not repeat herein) for someone he never finds. Moose, who has been out of the area for a while, struggles to understand that no one knows Velma or her whereabouts. Things end badly.

And this is how Marlowe ends up in the middle of a rather confusing case that involves, at various points, corrupt police, a psychic who seems to engaged in some decidedly non-psychic behaviors, a doctor who may or may not be distributing heroin, a spunky, red-headed Irish gal whose father was a police man, illegal gambling taking place far enough off shore that no one really cares about it, and the very beautiful wife of a very old, very rich man. And murder. Quite a lot of murder.

Once again, Chandler wields language like a scalpel. Or an angel.

It was close to the ocean and you could feel the ocean in the air but you couldn’t see water from the front of the place. Aster Drive had a long smooth curve there and the houses on the inland side were just nice houses, but on the canyon side they were great silent estates, with twelve foot walls and wrought iron gates and ornamental hedges; and inside, if you could get inside, a special brand of sunshine, very quiet, put up in noise-proof containers just for the upper classes.

This was the first time reading that I noticed Chandler making what appear to be references to other writers – Dr. Fell (I assume John Dickson Carr’s Dr. Gideon Fell) and Philo Vance both get a mention. He also refers to on of the police officers as “Hemingway.”

This book is packed full of striking sentences and paragraphs. No one else writes like Chandler, although it seems like so many writers have been trying to ape his style, generally to less than positive effect, in the decades since. It’s amazing that he wrote only 6 novels (I don’t think that Playback really counts. I never see anyone talking about it. I guess I’ll find out), given the depth of his influence.

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while, I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room . . . 

And this one. It’s so good.

The eighty-five cent dinner tasted like a discarded mail bag and was served to me by a waiter who looked as if he would slug me for a quarter, cut my throat for six bits, and bury me at sea in a barrel of concrete for a dollar and a half, plus sales tax.

I probably could have tabbed every other page with sentences that are that evocative.