Category Archives: Summer of Noir

The High Window by Raymond Chandler

The High WindowThe 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.

Friday Reads: 6.20.25

Something has really reignited my interest in blogging recently. Maybe it’s that I’m finding the internet so much more boring than I used to – enshittification is real.

Anyway, my 20 Books of Summer plan continues. I haven’t posted a review of The High Window (Marlowe #3) yet, but that’s coming. I’m also currently reading The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden, because I’m also on a quest for books that have a summer vibe to them. That is another planned post, but probably not until July.

I’m also expecting to finally finish Black Lamb and Grey Falcon next week. I’m down to about 150 pages left, which in an 1180 page book is a mere 14% of the book, although it’s long enough to be a novella in its own right. I’m in the final section – Montenegro – and then I have the 75 page Epilogue left. That book has been a marathon not a sprint and I cannot wait to remove it from the sidebar.

So, for next week, I’m planning to read:

  1. Casting Off by Elizabeth Jane Howard: this is the 4th book in the Cazalet Chronicles, which will just leave me with All Change to finish the series. I’m excited to see what’s next for Polly, Clary and Louise.
  2. The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson: this is one of the books in the LOA American Noir of the 1950’s collection and is on my Summer of Noir list. There is also a 2010 adaptation that I may or may not watch.
  3. The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler: book 4 of the Philip Marlowe series.

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

Farewell, My LovelyFarewell, 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.

1939: The Big Sleep by Philip Marlowe

The Big SleepThe Big Sleep
by Raymond Chandler
Rating: ★★★★½
Series: Philip Marlowe #1
Publication Date: February 6, 1939
Genre: noir
Pages: 231
ReRead?: Yes
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of crime

When a dying millionaire hires Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.


It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything a well dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

So begins The Big Sleep, the first of the novels featuring Philip Marlowe, the most famous and longest lasting of the hardboiled detectives in the noir tradition. Chandler writes like Hemingway, if I enjoyed Hemingway (and he wrote about crime). He has been imitated so many times that he is almost a parody of himself, except that he is so good.

I think I have read most of the Marlowe books previously, but never with any sort of intention. I have definitely not read Playback, the last of them. Has anyone read it? It never seems to be mentioned and may not be very good. I’m not sure if I’ve read The Little Sister. I’ve definitely read Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, The Lady in the Lake and The Long Goodbye.

Chandler’s L.A. is a place, a character and a feeling. Nostalgia is a trap, and in the case of Marlowe, it’s a trap that is grimy, well-worn and slightly sordid. I don’t live in L.A., visit it only occasionally, and can barely think of it without thinking of Marlowe and Bosch, two characters that I associate most firmly with it.

The thing about The Big Sleep is that the plot is almost entirely beside the point. Everyone says that Chandler was all about character and place and I believe this to be true. Each sentence is beautifully crafted to convey a feeling – as the reader, I can see his characters; they are archetypes, but they are his archetypes and no one else’s, except for all of the admirers who came after and all of the compatriots who came before but maybe didn’t do it quite so well. I can see the places he writes about, as well, and smell them, and hear them, I can see the outline of the palm tree in the diminishing light, and smell the slightly unpleasant odor of salt water and sewage.

We drove away from Las Olindas through a series of little dank beach towns with shack-like houses built down on the sand close to the rumble of the surf and larger houses built back on the slopes behind. A yellow window shone here and there, but most of the houses were dark. A smell of kelp came in off the water and lay in the fog. The tires sang on the moist concrete of the boulevard. The world was a wet emptiness.

Damn. That is so good.

But, back to the plot, which is convoluted and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It is fable at this point that when Chandler was writing the script for the movie adaptation, he was asked about one of the murders and who had committed it because the book overlooked identifying the perpetrator. It is reported that he said that he didn’t know. He had forgotten to resolve the plot point, and no one reading the book seems to have cared very much.

And isn’t it crazy that this book – which feels completely modern – was published 86 years ago.

A Summer of Noir

I often try to theme my summer reading – last year, I did a road trip theme, in which I read a book from a number of different states. This petered a bit, in the end, but was fun while it lasted. Also in years past, I’ve done themed reads around spy fiction/espionage, regency romance and fairy tale retellings.

This year, I’ve settled on mid-century (20th century, of course) noir for my theme. I’ve been in the process of purchasing a number of Library of America collections. So far, I’ve acquired:

  • American Noir: 11 classic crime novels of the ’30’s, ’40’s and ’50’s, which contains the following novels:
    • The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
    • They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy
    • Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson
    • The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing
    • Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham
    • I Married a Dead Man by Cornell Woolrich
    • The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
    • The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
    • Pick-Up by Charles Willeford
    • Down There by David Goodis
    • The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes
  • Crime Novels of the 1960’s, which contains the following novels:
    • Fredric Brown’s The Murderers (1961), a darkly comic look at a murderous plot hatched on the hip fringes of Hollywood.
    • Dan J. Marlowe’s terrifying The Name of the Game Is Death (1962), about a nihilistic career criminal on the run
    • Charles Williams’s Dead Calm (1963), a masterful novel of natural peril and human evil on the high seas.
    • Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man (1963), an unsettling tale of racism and wrongful accusation in the American Southwest.
    • Richard Stark’s taut The Score (1964), in which the master thief Parker plots the looting of an entire city with the cool precision of an expert mechanic.
    • The Fiend (1964), in which Margaret Millar maps the interlocking anxieties of a seemingly tranquil California suburb through the rippling effects of a child’s disappearance.
    • Ed McBain’s classic police procedural Doll (1965), a breakneck story that mixes murder, drugs, fashion models, and psychotherapy with the everyday professionalism of the 87th Precinct.
    • Run Man Run (1966), Chester Himes’s nightmarish tale of racism and police violence that follows a desperate young man seeking safe haven in New York City while being hunted by the law.
    • Patricia Highsmith’s ultimate meta-thriller, The Tremor of Forgery (1969), a novel in which a displaced traveler finds his own personality collapsing as he attempts to write a novel about a man coming undone.
  • Women Crime Writers: 8 Suspense Novels of the 1940’s and 1950’s, which collects:
    • Vera Caspary’s famous career girl mystery Laura;
    • Helen Eustis’s intricate campus thriller The Horizontal Man;
    • Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place, the terrifyingly intimate portrait of a serial killer;
    • Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall, in which a wife in wartime is forced to take extreme measures when her family is threatened;
    • Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief, the nightmarish drama of a child entrusted to a psychotic babysitter;
    • Patricia Highsmith’s brilliant The Blunderer, which tracks the perverse parallel lives of two men driven toward murder;
    • Margaret Millar’s Beast in View, a relentless study in madness;
    • Dolores Hitchens’s Fools’ Gold, a hard-edged tale of robbery and redemption.
  • Raymond Chandler: The Library of America Edition, which contains a number of short stories, and all 7 of his Philip Marlowe novels:
    • The Big Sleep;
    • Farewell, My Lovely;
    • The High Window;
    • The Lady in the Lake;
    • The Little Sister;
    • The Long Goodbye;
    • Playback

There are a few more on my list to purchase (there’s a Ross MacDonald collection that I definitely want, and a Dashiell Hammet collection that I might want), but I have busted my book budget for the month, so it won’t be until at least July that I replenish the coffers.

When I think of noir, I always think of summer. It’s not merely lore, but is reality, that when temperatures soar, tempers fray and the homicide rate goes up. The 4th of July tends to be one of the deadliest days of the year, and there are numerous studies that reflect that, at least in the U.S., we become more violent, more angry and more murderous during our long, hot summers. I’ve long believed that August, not April, is the cruelest month.

This particular reading theme doesn’t just have a literary component, though. A lot of the books I’ll be reading were adapted into well-regarded films, and I plan to watch some of them as I finish the source material.

So, at least part of my long, hot summer will be spent on crime of a very particular sort.