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 the Lake) This isn’t to say that the book is bad. It might very well be great, but for me, too many of the different threads of the book didn’t really seem to connect. This isn’t always a bad thing in Chandler’s novels. For example, in The Big Sleep there is a murder wherein the conclusion brought forward is that they didn’t know who killed a particular victim. 

However, in this novel, there is so much attention, for a time, put on particular threads, only for them to be somewhat soft-boiled (I’ll let myself out). Now, the book did legitimately make me question who the murderer was. This is something that Chandler is always good at in his books in my opinion. 

Regardless, the book is still a blast to listen to. Plus, a theme not often explored in Chandler's novels, is Marlow’s chivalrous actions. In this case, he saves the damsel by sweeping her away from the life she is living. So often in Chandler’s novels, the endings are particularly grim and unsatisfying. But here we see Marlow trying his hardest to rescue the damsel from the prison she resides. However, once again, Marlow does not get the girl. 

Overall, the book, while not his best in my opinion, is a great listen and probably a great read as well.