Algernon (Darth Anyan)'s Reviews > The High Window

She saw the cut glass decanter, took the stopper out, poured herself a drink and tossed it down with a quick flip of the wrist.
“You’re a man named Marlowe?” she asked, looking at me. She put her hips against the end of the desk and crossed her ankles.
I said I was a man named Marlowe.
“By and large,” she said, “I am quite sure I am not going to like you one damn little bit. So speak your piece and drift away.”

It’s a hard-boiled world out there, and a man named Marlowe must go down into its sewers in his pursuit of what we can probably name “The Mystery of the Brasher Doubloon”. In an opening scene that induces in the reader familiar with Chandler’s novels a strong feeling of deja-vu, Marlowe is called to an opulent mansion by a cranky old person of feeble health and given an easy job : not to find a missing young woman, but to track down a missing, very rare and precious gold coin.

All I knew about the people was that they were a Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock and family and that she wanted to hire a nice clean private detective who wouldn’t drop cigar ashes on the floor and never carried more than one gun.

What she gets instead is “Phil Marlowe. The shop-soiled Galahad.” , the disillusioned gumshoe with the sharp eye and the whiplash repartee. Marlowe smells a rat right from the start, but the rent must be paid and so he sets out to the mean streets, where heavy gamblers are slapping their moes, suave funeral directors manage the crime in the neighborhood, cops are only too willing to frame you for murder, young upstart detectives get chewed on as appetizers by the local sharks, clues lead from rundown dental businesses to posh and illegal gambling dens, and beautiful starlets are as trustworthy as hungry hyenas.

Chandler didn’t get to the top of my noir catalogue for his convoluted and improbable plot twists. It was always, right from the first page I read back in my school day, all about atitude and style. I haven’t revisited his dark universe recently, fearing my youthful enthusiasm will not survive a more critical view, but I discovered instead that the thrill is still there, and that the lyrical side of Marlowe is today even more appealing than his tough guy delivery:

Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets. They are all rooming houses now, their parquetry floors are scratched and worn through the once glossy finish and the wide sweeping staircases are dark with time and with cheap varnish laid on over generations of dirt. In the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun, and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles.
[...]
Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them.

No other crime writer has been able to replicate these soul damning similes or to match the sarcastic commentary on the predatory world the private detective must navigate, while keeping true to his inner sense of justice. Even when not firing from all cylinders, like in the case of the present novel, Chandler is still in a league of his own . He can make even a grocery list or a bland description of his office sound like poetry:

Three hard chairs and a swivel chair, flat desk with a glass top, five green filing cases, three of them full of nothing, a calendar and a framed license bond on the wall, a phone, a washbowl in a stained wood cupboard, a hatrack, a carpet that was just something on the floor, and two open windows with net curtains that puckered in and out like the lips of a toothless old man sleeping.
The same stuff I had had last year, and the year before that. Not beautiful, not gay, but better than a tent on the beach.

I am pretty sure I will not remember much of the plot five years from now, which might actually be a bonus, since I can re-read the novel and still enjoy some surprises – like why is the title referring to a window, when the mission is about a gold coin? (view spoiler)[ because there are actually three or four separate crimes that get tangled together, one of them decades old (hide spoiler)] . I may also forget some of Marlowe’s mannerisms and habits, and be again surprised that he smokes a pipe instead of cigarettes, and that he would rather play chess by himself at home than drink every night in a bar. What I would most like to remember are a few more of the lines from this novel, so here are the last bookmarks I made:

- a commentary on the Agatha Christie style of crime novel and (view spoiler)[ a reversal of stated expectations as Marlowe lets the main suspect escape on condition that he releases a young girl who was brainwashed into thinking she is a murderer. This plays right into the lone wolf justiciary image of Marlowe, who would rather bend the rules to help those in need than blindly apply the law (hide spoiler)]

“All right,” he said wearily. “Get on with it. I have a feeling you are going to be very brilliant. Remorseless flow of logic and intuition and all that rot. Just like a detective in a book.”
“Sure. Taking the evidence piece by piece, putting it all together in a neat pattern, sneaking in an odd bit I had on my hip here and there, analyzing the motives and characters and making them out to be quite different from what anybody – or I myself for that matter – thought them to be up to this golden moment – and finally making a sort of world-weary pounce on the least promising suspect.”

- two examples of the fast dialogue that sound just like those classic black and white movies from the forties:

“Don’t get me sore at you,” the carroty man said briefly.
“That would bother me like two percent of nothing at all”
-- -- --
“Mr Grandy, could you use a five dollar bill – not as a bribe in any sense, but as a token of esteem from a sincere friend?”
“Son, I could use a five dollar bill so rough Abe Lincoln’s whiskers would be all lathered up with sweat.”

- and a final image to take home and to cherish like one of those haiku gems:

The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don’t find.