Glenn Russell's Reviews > The High Window

Like all of Raymond Chandler’s novels, The High Window features private detective Philip Marlowe as first-person narrator reporting events unfolding as he attempts to crack a case in sun-soaked Los Angeles. I marvel at his perceptiveness and cleverness. Can anybody surpass Marlowe in his ability to see all the angles, to size people up, to catch all the clues, to ask the right questions, to crack wise at those times cracking wise is the wisest, to put the puzzle together so all the pieces fit in place? Maybe Sam Spade or other top dog dicks but that's about it. Oh, clever Odysseus, who fooled the Cyclopes, who heard the song of the Sirens and lived to tell the tale, Raymond Chandler gave you a rebirth as a private eye.

For anybody unfamiliar with Chandler, here is a snatch of dialogue taking place in Marlowe's office when a member of a very rich family comes to speak with the detective:

He looked me over without haste and without much pleasure. He blew some smoke delicately and spoke through it with a faint sneer.
"You're Marlowe?"
I nodded.
"I'm a little disappointed," he said. "I rather expected something with dirty fingers."
"Come inside," I said, "and you can be witty sitting down."
I held the door for him and he strolled past me flicking cigarette ash on the floor with the middle nail of his free hand. He sat down . . . He leaned back in his chair with the smile of a bored aristocrat.
"All set?" I inquired. "Pulse and respiration normal?" You wouldn't like a cold towel on your head or anything."

Through Marlowe, Chandler introduces us to a host of gangsters, crooks, con-artists, thugs, goons and their dames who take turns planning, threatening and committing violence as if they were flesh-and-blood members of the weasel patrol from Toontown.

Here is another bit of dialogue where Marlowe watches from behind a curtain as a shady nightclub manager speaks to his wife after they find his wife's boyfriend shot in the head:

Silence. Then the sound of a blow. The woman wailed. She was hurt, terribly hurt. Hurt in the depths of her soul. She made it rather good.
"Look, angel," Morny snarled. "Don't feed me the ham. I've been in pictures. I'm a connoisseur of ham. Skip it. You're going to tell me how this was done if I have to drag you around the room by your hair. Now - did you wipe off the gun?"

Philip Marlowe is not only an incredibly super-sharp observer, but he is also an intelligent, well-educated, highly ethical man. Two cases in point: when the name Heathcliff is mentioned, he knows the character is from Wuthering Heights and when someone shows him entries in a diary, he alludes to the Diary of Samuel Pepys.

This contrast between the crime and social grime of 1940s Los Angeles and the presence of Philip Marlow gives Chandler's work real abiding depth.

There are hundreds of authors, some very good, who have written detective fiction or crime fiction but what sets Raymond Chandler apart is the polished literary language matching any American author, including the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Falkner.

This is the prime reason I have included the above quotes and the reason I will end this review with another sparkling vintage Chandler quote, this one where Marlowe describes the woman he sees when being led by a tall, dark, olive skinned crook to the back yard of a suburban LA mansion:

"A long-limbed languorous type of showgirl blond lay at her ease in one of the chairs, with her feet raised on a padded rest and a tall misted glass at her elbow, near a silver ice bucket and a Scotch bottle. She looked at us lazily as we came over the grass. From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away. Her mouth was too wide, her eyes were too blue, her makeup was too vivid, the thin arch of her eyebrows was almost fantastic in its curve and spread, and the mascara was so thick on her eyelashes that they looked like miniature iron railings."