Out in the 1940s Crime Noir Night –Raymond Chandler’s The High Window

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Book Review

The High Window, Raymond Chandler, Vintage Crime Books, New York, 1942

Yah, like the man said one time the rich are different from you and me. They try , try very hard, to not let anything untoward come into their radar dust on the furniture to murder to mayhem if that what turns out to be the case when they go off the deep end. They just let the hired help pick up the mess and sort things out the best they, the help, can. And if you were trying to keep murder and mayhem away from your door in the 1940s night and if you resided in the precincts of Southern California around Los Angeles , L.A, the city of angels (and angles) then Raymond Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe was your man. And the reason that he was your man was because he fixed up your messes, fixed it up with bandages if he had to but he fixed them, and they stayed fixed until or unless you strayed from the reservation again.

So, yah, if you needed a man you could trust, needed a guy who worked the both the seamy side and the high side and didn’t miss a beat, needed a guy who didn’t mind taking a punch or two, a slug or two, for good of the cause, needed a guy who for his own private reasons chased after windmills then old Marlowe was your man. Your man at twenty-five a day and expenses. Cheap at any price. Just ask the Murdocks in the tale in The High Window reviewed here, although like a lot of stuff with the rich (and maybe not just the rich) they probably have forgotten how close they came to perdition.

See the Brasher Doubloon was missing, a rare old coin, from the late Mr. Murdock’s collection. So dear rich inebriated (for her asthmatic condition, okay) old, to be kind, bitch Mrs. Murdock sent for one Philip Marlowe to find the damn thing. Find it on the cheap and quietly, if possible. Problem was that the prime suspect in the theft was her beloved doted on pampered son who was into a local mobster for some serious gambling debt dough. But well before that hard fact was established some people who got in the way would up dead, very dead, for their efforts. Part of the body pile-up was due to the greed of a number of people trying to make imitation copies of the coin, part of the pile-up was due to knowing too much about the operation and part was just people getting in the way for no good reason, what would be now called collateral damage.

Needless to say Old Marlowe gets to the bottom of the whole thing, takes his usual fair share of lumps, takes his fair share of abuses from the cops when he tries, as he always does, to protect, rightly or wrongly, his client, and takes his fair share of abuse from his dear client along the way. As a bonus he also plays Sir Galahad to the rescue to Mrs. Murdock’s secretary, a frail high strung young woman who was made the patsy for Mrs. Murdock’s murder of her first husband out that high window of the title. All for twenty-five a day. Yah, the rich are different from you and me.

Oh, about Raymond Chandler, about the guy who wrote the book. Like I said in another review he, along with Brother Dashiell Hammett, turned those dreary gentile drawing room sleuths who dominated the reading market way back in the day on its head and gave us tough guy blood and guts detectives we could admire, could get behind, warts and all. Thanks, guys.

In Chandler’s case he drew strength from his seemingly starling use of language to describe Marlowe’s environment much in the way a detective would use his heightened powers of observation during an investigation, missing nothing. Marlowe was able to size up, let’s say, a sizzling blonde, as a statuesque, full-bodied and ravishing dame and then pick her apart as nothing but a low-rent gold-digger. Of course that never stopped him from taking a run at one or two of them himself and then sending them off into the night, or to the clink, to fend for themselves. He also knew how to blow off a small time chiseler, a grifter, as so much flamboyance and hot air not neglecting to notice that said grifter had moisture above his upper lip indicating that he stood in fear of something if only his shadow as he attempted to pull some caper, or tried to pull the wool over Marlowe’s eyes.

The list of descriptions goes on and on -sullen bartenders wiping a random whisky glass, flighty chorus girls arm in arm with wrong gee gangsters, Hollywood starlet wannabes displaying their wares a little too openly , old time geezers, toothless, melting away in some thankless no account job, guys working out of small-time airless no front cheap jack offices in rundown building s on the wrong side of town doing, well, doing the best they can. And cops, good cops, bad cops, all with that cop air about them of seen it all, done it all, blasé, and by the way spill your guts before the billy- club comes down (that spill your guts thing a trait that our Marlowe seems organically incapable of having). He had come from them, from the D.A.s office in the old days, had worked with them on plenty of cases but generally he tried to treat them like one might a snake not quite sure whether it is poisonous or not.

At the same time Chandler was a master of setting the details of the space Marlowe had to work in- the high hill mansions and the back alley rooming houses (although usually not the burgeoning ranchero middle class locales since apparently that segment of society has not need of his services and therefore no need of a description of their endless sameness and fauxgentility). He has a fix on the museum-like quality of the big houses, the places like General Sternwood’s in The Big Sleep or Mrs. Murdock’s in The High Window reflecting old wealth California. And he has a razor sharp sense of the arrivisite, the new blood all splash and glitter, all high- ceiling bungalow, swimming pools, and landscaped gardens.

But where Chandler made his mark was in his descriptions of the gentile seedy places, the mansions of old time Bunker Hill turned to rooming houses with that faint smell of urine, that strong smell of liquor, that loud noise that comes with people living too close together, too close to breath their simple dreams. Or the descriptions of the back alley offices in the rundown buildings that had seen better days populated by the failed dentists, the sly repo men, the penny ante insurance brokers, the con artists, the flotsam and jetsam of the losers in the great American West night just trying to hang on from rent payment to rent payment. Those denizens of these quarters usually had a walk on role, or wound up with two slugs to the head, but Chandler knew the type, had the type down solid.

Nor was Chandler above putting a little social commentary in Marlowe’s mouth. Reflections on such topics as that very real change after World War II in the kind of swarms that were heading west to populate the American Western shore night. The rise of the corner boys hanging, just hanging, around blasted storefronts, a few breaking off into the cranked up hot rod hell’s highway night. The restless mobsters for broken back East looking to bake out in the southern California sun while taking over the vast crime markets. The wannabe starlets ready to settle for less than stardom for the right price. The old California money (the gold rush, gold coast, golden era money) befuddled by the all new waves coming in. And above all a strong sense of the rootlessness, the living in the moment, the grabbing while the grabbing was good mentality that offended old Marlowe’s honor code.

And of course over a series of books Chandler expanded the Marlowe character, expanded his range of emotions, detailed his growing world-weariness, his growing wariness, his small compromises with that code of honor that he honed back in the 1930s . Yes, Marlowe the loner, the avenging angel , the righter of wrongs, maybe little wrongs but wrongs in this wicked old world. The guy who sometimes had to dig deep sometimes in his office desk drawer to grab a shot of whiskey to help him think things through. Marlowe the guy of a thousand punches, the guy of a hundred knocks on the head, the guy who had taken a more than one slug for the cause, the guy who was every insurance company’s nightmare and a guy who could have used some Obamacare health insurance no questions asked . Yah, Marlowe.