On Re-Reading Raymond Chandler's "The High Window" 5-2010

I found Raymond Chandler's The High Window in the bookshelves where I am incarcerated. Long, long since I read this one.

I remember this being my least favorite Chandler. Might blame that opinion on the book I read - I recall the pages yellowed and the reading physically unpleasant. (Here's a thought for the e-book future - no longer will the written works be challenged by the physical text's decay. Also, they may rescue back catalogs, like the CD rescues music back catalogs.)

I am liking this book better than I did before. Still... it is not great Chandler. 

I was surprised by what I did remember! Surprised as I read this once - never re-read like The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely.

Funny, though, I still have some of the same reactions. The characters seem dry, dull - the client an ugly female version of The Big Sleep's General Sternwood - far too dull, lifeless, and dull. 

Trying to remember if this followed The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely. The two thugs make little impact compared with The Big Sleep's Eddie Mars. Jesse Breese gives us a different kind of Chandler cop, and the last chapter is superb.

That Marlowe has a femme fatale to play off does not bother me. What strikes me odd is the complete absence of World War II. Then, too, I cannot remember the war mentioned in any Chandler novel. Odd. Odd, I never noticed this. Not that Chandler was the forerunner to Stuart Kaminsky's Toby Peters series, but come on. Rex Stout acknowledged World War II. makes me think Chandler was re-working old s stuff. (Has anyone done a chronology of the Marlowe stories, as has been done for Sherlock Holmes? I'd vote to put The High Window in the summer of '41 - based on the cars mentioned.)

Two thoughts came to me, with perhaps an interrelated answer: 1) is Marlowe a reliable narrator; and 2) how have the movies affected how we think of Marlowe? In The High Window, Marlowe is often told he is not as bright as he thinks he is, and Marlowe often agrees. Yet, he can make wisecracks requiring some education (even today, if not more so today). Yet, the Marlowe of the movies comes off as tough and smart. Whether Bogart or Powell or Garner or Mitchum - none played dumb (actually, I would say Garner came across as the brightest). I recall reading that The High Window was adapted into a Lloyd Nolan movie, and I got to say I can hear Nolan mouthing this book's dialog.

Good enough for an incarcerated fool, but I suggest reading Chandler like this:

1. The Big Sleep
2. Farewell, My Lovely
3. Lady in the Lake/The Little Sister
4. The High Window
5. Playback

 [Yeah, I left off The Long Goodbye. I had trouble with it, then I read it again after making these notes, and would now put it at #4. Yes, it is special, probably as good as the critics say it is, but it is a strange book. One that might have given Chandler a different purpose for his fiction. sch 10/27/22.]

One last thought brings in Hammett. Compared with Marlowe, all of Hammett's detectives come across more certain. Even my favorite, Ned Beaumont, has a drive missing from the Marlowe of The High Window.

[For a different view, a video review. sch]