::READERS REVIEWS::

Still the best - Even with all the years long gone, Chandler is still the best. The High Window may not be high profile, but it's still top of the game. Highly recommended.

Skips a beat, but worth your while... - Having read The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, I dove eagerly into the next Raymond Chandler novel in queue. The High Window offers the standard Chandler fare of murder, blackmail and general malefaction, though its characters don't form quite as well. Philip Marlowe, the archetypical 40's investigator, is reliably entertaining, but Merle Davis, the flighty personal assistant of Marlowe's client, is so neurotic she defies description. Ultimately, she also defies the plot.

It's important to point out that I appraise in relative terms. The author's previous novels were so entertaining that even the slightest Chandler misstep would resound. But, Merle Davis is a difficult proposition to get past and she eventually becomes the heart of the story.

Still, it's an engrossing story and, while it might not hit the heights of previous efforts, it is classic Raymond Chandler: 40's-era LA, mystery and menace, and a cunning private eye. Because of this, it deserves to be read. 4 stars.

Great Chandler novel--because it's so different - I found this to be first-rate Phil Marlowe, probably my favorite after Big Sleep, mainly because it does not deliver what we've come to expect from the genre. Some other resemblances between The Big Sleep to make this point: this book also features an unhealthy, rich client and an unstable young woman, and Marlowe's looking for a missing household member. Here it's an unpleasant widow who incessantly drinks port that hires Phil to find her wimpy son's wife, whom she suspects of stealing a rare gold doubloon from her husband's collection. No sooner is Marlowe on the case than the coin is returned, but by this time two dead bodies have turned up, along with another doubloon. The entire case lasts two days, but Marlowe earns his pay.

But while some elements of the setting and characters seem to purposefully recall The Big SLeep, Chandler makes it clear he's writing a different kind of story. He avoids the clichés here, even though at this time they probably weren't clichés. For instance, although the missing wife is a good-looking nightclub singer, she barely figures in the case and is only in one scene; so much for our expectation, borne of Classic Hollywood, that the smoldering dame will be at the bottom of it all. Additionally, Marlowe is (for a noir tough guy) surprisingly compassionate and sympathetic at the end of the novel, refreshingly affected by what's happened, at odds with the image of the tortured private eye reporting truth in spite of who gets hurt.

In all, a very clever and atmospheric mystery without the wildness of Farewell or the weariness Lady in the Lake. I understand some readers' beef with it, but I found the whole thing delightfully surprising without being (conventionally) suspenseful.

Superior fiction even if one of Chandler's lesser efforts - To be honest, it seems kind of silly giving this book only four stars. If you compare it to the vast majority of hardboiled or detective novels ever written, it would deserve five stars. It is only when it is compared to Chandler's other books that it falls short. This was his third novel, published after THE BIG SLEEP (which started the vogue for starting books and movies with the words "The Big") and FAREWELL, MY LOVELY. In none of those books is plot and story as important as Chandler's exquisite prose, his wonderfully detailed descriptions, or his magnificently decadent characters. But even so the plots of those two look brilliant compared to this one.

The number of problems with the plot of THE HIGH WINDOW is legion, but I'll highlight only two. Chandler wants Philip Marlowe to discover a body. There are a million ways to do this, but instead of something elegant and simple, Chandler creates incredibly unlikely scenarios whereby the future corpse gives Chandler a key to his apartment so that he won't be forced to wait around if he somehow doesn't happen to be there. This is such a cheap device that it is almost as if Chandler were trying to parody storytelling. Perhaps even sillier is a bizarre gun swap, in which the killer goes into a nearby apartment, finds a gun under the pillow of the tenant, and switches it with his own. Much of the subsequent story hinges on the strange gun swap.

So, as an example of plot, THE HIGH WINDOW is a failure. Nonetheless, there is still the prose. Although Chandler is unquestionably one of the most imitated writers in literary history, no one has quite been able to match his power with words. Marlow enters a club. "A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins." He prepares to question someone. "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." He describes the residents of Bunker Hill: "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 the cupped hand that shields the match flame . . . people who look like nothing in particular and know it."

And there are the characters. Though the best characters in THE HIGH WINDOW are not as memorable as the many, many memorable characters in THE BIG SLEEP or FAREWELL, MY LOVELY, there are still several so striking as to not easily slip out of mind.

But substandard Chandler or not, he is one of those writers so brilliant and original that he deserves to be read in toto. One should read not this or that novel, but all of it, short stories included. He is one of the few writers to have played a major role in shaping our culture as a whole. But besides that, his books -- even the lesser ones -- are just a great, great read.

A Fantastic View from A High Window - Raymond Chandler is that rare sort of novelist who creates a world that sings with individuality while inviting others to join the fun. That, perhaps, is Chandler's greatest talent--he makes his world inviting while never pandering to prurient or common tastes. In A High Window, Philip Marlowe, Chandler's famous American icon of cynicism and subtle honor, is tasked with finding a rare coin and the person who stole it. His client is a bossy, asthmatic, hulk of a woman who downs glass after glass of port and who doesn't mind telling Marlowe her low opinion of his character and skills. Of course, she's wrong. And she's hiding all sorts of secrets of her own. As in all Philip Marlowe adventures, the ride is always more fun than the destination. When you read Raymond Chandler, you're lovingly dumped into a landscape filled with bums, dames, rich psychotics, corrupt cops, and sleazy hotel managers. And those are the ordinary people in his novels. Read A High Window. Get out your trenchcoat. Be sure to pack a .45. You're going to "noir" town.

Donald Gallinger is the author ofThe Master Planets