“We stared at each other, with that inner hostility that had been there from the first. After a moment I pushed my chair back and went over to the french windows. I opened the screen and stepped out on to the porch. The night was all around, soft and quiet. The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don't find.” — Raymond Chandler, The High Window
When you read a Raymond Chandler thriller, you hang on tight while your knuckles turn white on his rollercoaster ride. The pages flip themselves. It’s easy to barrel through the whole mystery, barely remarking that Chandler is a great writer. He’ll startle you with instants of beauty, and occasionally his poetic soul shines through “like the justice we dream of but don't find.” But he’s a craftsman with no time for showing off — he’s too busy tightening his plot, sharpening his characters, and building his tangled world of looming shadows and glaring Californian sun.
Raymond Chandler is my new favorite writer. His mysteries take place in an exaggerated Los Angeles of the 1940s, which in the reader’s mind is black and white, more black than white, just like the film noirs that Chandler’s mysteries inspired. At least, the ambience of his stories is haunted by that dangerous twilight; even when he paints fine details in color, and brings each instant vividly to life. I’m an Angeleno today, and I’m beguiled by the half-familiar, half-jarring journey, back into Chandler’s expressionist LA of seventy years ago.
Plotting, Character, and Style
The broadest foundations of writing are Plotting, Character, and Style. Chandler mastered all of them, with a clear compelling flow that he made look easy. I’m partial to Chandler, and under his spell, so perhaps I’m overselling him. Still, it seems to me that he writes a finely carved, substantial book, then passes it off as a lowbrow thriller. He has all the quality of literature, but none of the pretension.
Plotting is crucial in a mystery. All the story’s gears must mesh together just so, and your mechanism needs to tick surprisingly yet convincingly, to keep jaded mystery fans absorbed in the puzzle you’re slowly revealing. It’s not essential that a mystery reader solve that puzzle before the protagonist does, but they should bring a detective’s eye and memory for details to the case. In order to grasp the whole web, they should read with constantly elevated attention. Thus, a mystery story needs to be very smartly plotted, to ask and deserve so much of our brainwork. Chandler was a voracious fan of mysteries before he wrote any, so he learned what worked in plotting, and which tricks had been rehashed to death. His plots are fresh and complex, they pull us in and keep our eyes wide.
Chandler also had an instinct for inventing Character. Everyone we meet in his novels is well-drawn and singular; his major characters are fascinating, so we keep curious to learn more of them. But Chandler’s detective, Philip Marlowe, is the engine who pulls every element together and crystallizes his story’s world. I think that when Chandler invented this “shop-soiled Galahad”, he found the full power of his own voice. Once Chandler saw Marlowe, the dark slippery undercurrents of LA flowed naturally around him.
Philip Marlowe’s World
I’ll show you glimpses of Philip Marlowe’s world, where Raymond Chandler’s imagination learned to swim. He loved Marlowe, he poured his actual self (and his dreamed-of better self) into this brooding, unstable Los Angeles, which Chandler knew well. But Marlowe’s world is more heightened, colorful and dangerous. He wanders through the mansions and alleyways of this City of Angels and fallen angels. Marlowe circles the shallows of cupidity and corruption, keeping a fin’s length away from the biggest sharks. But he’s hunting relentlessly for clues and answers, and soon gets sucked into the deeps of crime and violence.
Marlowe’s world starts with his storytelling. He has a rare gift for it. He paints the whole picture, he sees everything that matters, and he captures its sparkling life.
The Belfont Building was eight stories of nothing in particular that had got itself pinched off between a large green and chromium cut rate suit emporium and a three-story and basement garage that made a noise like lion cages at feeding time. The small dark narrow lobby was as dirty as a chicken yard. The building directory had a lot of vacant space on it. Only one of the names meant anything to me and I knew that one already. Opposite the directory a large sign tilted against the fake marble wall said: Space for Renting Suitable for Cigar Stand. Apply Room 316.
There were two open-grill elevators but only one seemed to be running and that not busy. An old man sat inside it slack-jawed and watery-eyed on a piece of folded burlap on top of a wooden stool. He looked as if he had been sitting there since the Civil War and had come out of that badly.
I got in with him and said eight, and he wrestled the doors shut and cranked his buggy and we dragged upwards lurching. The old man breathed hard, as if he was carrying the elevator on his back.
Chandler keeps it real, to his world: the perilous and pestilent LA, that we all know from the genres that sprang in his wake — hard-boiled mysteries, and film noir. We recognize this world, even if we’ve never been there. It echoes down through 20th Century fiction, through Dirty Harry, all the way to Bladerunner and beyond.
Yet there’s nothing standard in this storytelling. The canvas and details are original, seen from unusual angles and painted poetically: “[a] basement garage that made a noise like lion cages at feeding time.” Marlowe always sees slightly off-kilter, he keeps us unsettled, always peering nervously. And smelling, hearing and touching too, as Marlowe brings all his detective’s senses to each new scene.
Marlowe is gnarled and charming at once. Humphrey Bogart, who played him in The Big Sleep, inhabited his contradictions and nuances. He has both a darkly cynical wit, and an empathy towards anyone with a decent heart; especially those who need a little rescuing. At his core is a life of experience and close observation, and a firm moral compass through the murky waters he swims in. He can always tell good guys from bad, and reliably scope all the grays in between.
Chandler has a marvelous narrative voice. He’s similar to the omniscient narrator we know from older books: watching over earth with a calm, clear, comprehensive view. But in Chandler’s telling, that voice is flecked continually with Marlowe’s empathy, opinions and sardonic wit. He feels the elevator operator’s spirit, “The old man breathed hard, as if he was carrying the elevator on his back”; but he also mocks him, “He looked as if he had been sitting there since the Civil War and had come out of that badly.”
Like Dickens or Twain, Chandler may caricature, but he usually laughs tenderly with, not at, his targets. Unless he smells a wrongness, a darkness in them. Then he truly scorns them. These are hard waters to swim in, for a romantic soul. They often drive Marlowe to drink, as an anesthetic for his pained heart; and they did the same to Chandler. Marlowe is, precisely, a “shop-soiled Galahad”. He is an Arthurian knight fallen into a world of petty schemers and double-crossers.
Mowers Moving Delicately over Serene and Confident Lawns
Stillwood Crescent Drive curved leisurely north from Sunset Boulevard, well beyond the Bel-Air Country Club golf course. The road was lined with walled and fenced estates. Some had high walls, some had low walls, some had ornamental iron fences, some were a bit oldfashioned and got along with tall hedges. The street had no sidewalk. Nobody walked in that neighborhood, not even the mailman.
The afternoon was hot, but not hot like Pasadena. There was a drowsy smell of flowers and sun, a swishing of lawn sprinklers gentle behind hedges and walls, the clear ratchety sound of lawn mowers moving delicately over serene and confident lawns.
You can call a lawn “serene”, and still be realistic. The grass has no serenity in its unfeeling blades, but the lawn feels serene to us, because it evokes that calm in human observers. However, no lawn could accurately be called “confident”. Objectivity has fallen out of Marlowe’s narration. Los Angeles is tinted by Marlowe’s intuitions; and Marlowe is an everyman, piercing the truth that all of LA knows, but rarely says out loud.
This is my favorite part of Marlowe’s voice: just how much humanity he smuggles in, and how subtly. His asides—in this case, a single word—measure the flaws and foibles in each of his characters, then place them against a backdrop of his own Inferno and Purgatorio. But the many-circled hell Marlowe inhabits is Los Angeles society, from its pompous peaks to its depraved valleys. Stillwood Crescent Drive has “confident lawns”, because they project the personalities of their haughty owners.
Chandler can show us the bright heights of LA, but he finds more intrigue and electricity down in her alleys and her underworld. He was drawn to the dirty and dangerous parts of LA, because he wanted to rescue crime from the English tea parlors that owned it in his day, and bring it back to its natural habitat. The other founder of hard-boiled Mystery, who came just before Chandler, was Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man). Chandler wrote of him, in The Simple Art of Murder:
Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.
Chandler did the same. He found the wrong side of LA a fresh, authentic, and compelling world for his murders. But he also saw all the wrongness that crept up to the ridges, and the corridors of power and wealth. He saw a blight that touched every part of this glittering but rotten city.
“I'm not delicate enough for that.”
I’ve read three Chandlers in recent months, and enjoyed them all; I liked The High Window about as much as The Lady in the Lake, and a tad more than Playback. But the question this review should settle is, will you like Chandler too? Enough to read one of his mysteries from cover to cover, while so many other unread books clamor for your attention?
The best way I can serve you here is to share a large dollop of text from The High Window, including character exploration, plot development and banter. We are right near the start of the book. Philip Marlowe has been called by Mrs. Murdock to her Pasadena home, so she can take his measure and decide whether to hire him to solve her case. She got Marlowe’s name from her bank manager, who heard second-hand that he was smart and reliable. Marlowe is now being led in, to meet this graying lioness in her den.
"Mrs. Murdock will see you now."
We went along some more hallway and she opened half of a double glass door and stood aside. I went in and the door was closed behind me.
It was so dark in there that at first I couldn't see anything but the outdoors light coming through thick bushes and screens. Then I saw that the room was a sort of sun porch that had been allowed to get completely overgrown outside. It was furnished with grass rugs and reed stuff. There was a reed chaise longue over by the window. It had a curved back and enough cushions to stuff an elephant and there was a woman leaning back on it with a wine glass in her hand. I could smell the thick scented alcoholic odor of the wine before I could see her properly. Then my eyes got used to the light and I could see her.
She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones. There was lace at her throat, but it was the kind of throat that would have looked better in a football sweater. She wore a grayish silk dress. Her thick arms were bare and mottled. There were jet buttons in her ears. There was a low glass-topped table beside her and a bottle of port on the table. She sipped from the glass she was holding and looked at me over it and said nothing.
I stood there. She let me stand while she finished the port in her glass and put the glass down on the table and filled it again. Then she tapped her lips with a handkerchief. Then she spoke. Her voice had a hard baritone quality and sounded as if it didn't want any nonsense.
"Sit down, Mr. Marlowe. Please do not light that cigarette. I'm asthmatic."
I sat down in a reed rocker and tucked the still unlighted cigarette down behind the handkerchief in my outside pocket.
"I've never had any dealing with private detectives, Mr. Marlowe. I don't know anything about them. Your references seem satisfactory. What are your charges?"
"To do what, Mrs. Murdock?"
"It's a very confidential matter, naturally. Nothing to do with the police. If it had to do with the police, I should have called the police."
"I charge twenty-five dollars a day, Mrs. Murdock. And of course expenses."
"It seems high. You must make a great deal of money." She drank some more of her port. I don't like port in hot weather, but it's nice when they let you refuse it.
"No," I said. "It isn't. Of course you can get detective work done at any price--just like legal work. Or dental work. I'm not an organization. I'm just one man and I work at just one case at a time. I take risks, sometimes quite big risks, and I don't work all the time. No, I don't think twenty-five dollars a day is too much."
"I see. And what is the nature of the expenses?"
"Little things that come up here and there. You never know."
"I should prefer to know," she said acidly.
"You'll know," I said. "You'll get it all down in black and white. You'll have a chance to object, if you don't like it."
"And how much retainer would you expect?"
"A hundred dollars would hold me," I said.
"I should hope it would," she said and finished her port and poured the glass full again without even waiting to wipe her lips.
"From people in your position, Mrs. Murdock, I don't necessarily have to have a retainer."
"Mr. Marlowe," she said, "I'm a strong-minded woman. But don't let me scare you. Because if you can be scared by me, you won't be much use to me."
I nodded and let that one drift with the tide.
She laughed suddenly and then she belched. It was a nice light belch, nothing showy, and performed with easy unconcern. "My asthma," she said carelessly. "I drink this wine as medicine. That's why I'm not offering you any."
I swung a leg over my knee. I hoped that wouldn't hurt her asthma.
"Money," she said, "is not really important. A woman in my position is always overcharged and gets to expect it. I hope you will be worth your fee. Here is the situation. Something of considerable value has been stolen from me. I want it back, but I want more than that. I don't want anybody arrested. The thief happens to be a member of my family-- by marriage."
She turned the wine glass with her thick fingers and smiled faintly in the dim light of the shadowed room. "My daughter-in-law," she said. "A charming girl--and tough as an oak board."
She looked at me with a sudden gleam in her eyes.
"I have a damn fool of a son," she said. "But I'm very fond of him. About a year ago he made an idiotic marriage, without my consent. This was foolish of him because he is quite incapable of earning a living and he has no money except what I give him, and I am not generous with money. The lady he chose, or who chose him, was a night club singer. Her name, appropriately enough, was Linda Conquest. They have lived here in this house. We didn't quarrel because I don't allow people to quarrel with me in my own house, but there has not been good feeling between us. I have paid their expenses, given each of them a car, made the lady a sufficient but not gaudy allowance for clothes and so on. No doubt she found the life rather dull. No doubt she found my son dull. I find him dull myself. At any rate she moved out, very abruptly, a week or so ago, without leaving a forwarding address or saying good-by."
She coughed, fumbled for a handkerchief, and blew her nose.
"What was taken," she went on, "was a coin. A rare gold coin called a Brasher Doubloon. It was the pride of my husband's collection. I care nothing for such things, but he did. I have kept the collection intact since he died four years ago. It is upstairs, in a locked fireproof room, in a set of fireproof cases. It is insured, but I have not reported the loss yet. I don't want to, if I can help it. I'm quite sure Linda took it. The coin is said to be worth over ten thousand dollars. It's a mint specimen."
[. . . more conversation . . . ]
"Young man, do you want this job or don't you?"
"I want it if I'm told the facts and allowed to handle the case as I see fit. I don't want it if you're going to make a lot of rules and regulations for me to trip over."
She laughed harshly. "This is a delicate family matter, Mr. Marlowe. And it must be handled with delicacy."
"If you hire me, you'll get all the delicacy I have. If I don't have enough delicacy, maybe you'd better not hire me. For instance, I take it you don't want your daughter-in-law framed. I'm not delicate enough for that."
She turned the color of a cold boiled beet and opened her mouth to yell. Then she thought better of it, lifted her port glass and tucked away some more of her medicine.
"You'll do," she said dryly, "I wish I had met you two years ago, before he married her."
I enjoy Marlowe’s whole personality, especially his dry wit and social commentary: “I don't like port in hot weather, but it's nice when they let you refuse it.” Chandler draws strong characters, then rubs them against each other to build up a static charge, eager to spark. He weaves a world upon all our senses, his action patters forward, tensions gradually build, something is bound to explode.
If I had to find fault with Chandler’s writing, there is some roughness there. His main characters are all complex, but you’ll meet occasional stereotypes along the way, and a few racist and sexist tropes. He was drawing from the pulp magazines of his day, and he’s a lot less coarse than most of those. Crucially, I can forgive his lapses because I find very little meanness in Chandler, no sense that he considered any particular types of human inferior to any other. In a similar vein, while he’s pretty tame measured against the brutal and pornographic elements of some modern crime writers, Chandler has his own lurid moments; though again, quite rarely.
Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888, and spent his childhood in Nebraska. When he was 12, his father abandoned them, so his Irish mother took him to London, where family could help them. Raymond got a classical education at Dulwich College, just after P. G. Wodehouse graduated from there. He joined the civil service, and took an Admiralty job briefly. He then spent several years in England, as a run of the mill, unsuccessful journalist, and wrote romantic poetry on the side. A chance encounter with another poet discouraged Chandler from this writing life: "I met... also a young, bearded, and sad-eyed man called Richard Middleton. ... Shortly afterwards he committed suicide in Antwerp, a suicide of despair, I should say. The incident made a great impression on me, because Middleton struck me as having far more talent than I was ever likely to possess; and if he couldn't make a go of it, it wasn't very likely that I could."
Chandler then moved to California, and spent the next twenty years moving around and trying various jobs, including a year fighting in WWI, with ups and downs along the way. In 1931 he had been at the Dabney Oil Syndicate for several years, and was a highly paid vice president. But then his alcoholism, absenteeism, promiscuity with female employees, and threatened suicides led to his dismissal a year later. So Chandler became a traveling salesman, barely scraping by. On his road to Damascus, he saw the noir. As he recalled it:
“Wandering up and down the Pacific Coast in an automobile I began to read pulp magazines, because they were cheap enough to throw away and because I never had at any time any taste for the kind of thing which is known as women's magazines. This was in the great days of the Black Mask (if I may call them great days) and it struck me that some of the writing was pretty forceful and honest, even though it had its crude aspect. I decided that this might be a good way to try to learn to write fiction and get paid a small amount of money at the same time. I spent five months over an 18,000 word novelette and sold it for $180. After that I never looked back, although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward.”
In his first career, as a young man in England, Chandler had mastered stuffy journalese and purple poetry. So he had experience of proper and literary writing. Glimmers of that poke through in his mysteries, usually when Marlowe sails an erudite reference right over the head of some thug or moll. But the language he found in the pulps spoke to another part of him: “the writing was pretty forceful and honest, even though it had its crude aspect.” It was here that he found his natural voice. Since his voice was more rich, layered, and polished than anyone else writing pulps, Chandler proceeded to elevate and expand the pulps’ vocabulary into what soon became known as Hard-Boiled Mystery.
If you’ve read this far, and read every word, I thank you, dear reader. Perhaps after reading this diary you’re thinking, “Raymond Chandler does have something, and I’m intrigued — but I’m not yet convinced to go out and buy a book of his.” If that’s how you feel, then you should bookmark this link, to the whole text of The High Window. Please to enjoy. There’s no other writer quite like him.