Book Review: The High Window by Raymond Chandler
*Full disclosure, I listened to this one as an audiobook, so I’m sure the reading experience would be different than the listening. The High Window was the author Raymond Chandler’s third installment of the Phillip Marlow Mystery series. Written in 1942, the book is firmly in the genre of hardboiled detective fiction. Hard-boiled here means, as the Encyclopedia Brittanica puts it, “ a tough, unsentimental style of American crime writing[.]” This is to say, that, unlike much of the previous iterations of pulp fiction and other detective/crime fiction, hard-boiled fiction embraced the grittiness and hopelessness that permeates the world of crime and justice. Chandler was not trying to craft a beautiful world but to bring a mirror up to a rotten one that was doing the best it could. Of the Chandler novels that I have read (fine.. Listened too…) The High Window is probably the weakest thus far. (I have so far listened to The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, Goodbye, My Lovely, and Lady in
