Class isn’t as big a theme in American literature as one might expect, but it crops up often enough. In Raymond Chandler’s The High Window, it comes into play two ways, as income and moral refinement.
Protagonist Philip Marlowe is a very classy guy who relates to what it is to be down-and-out. When he pays a visit to the palatial Pasadena home of Mrs. Murdock, a wealthy widow who marinates in her port-soaked seclusion, he takes it in with the air of a jaded Bolshevik:
“The sidewalk and the parkway were both very wide and in the parkway were three white acacias that were worth seeing. There was a heavy scent of summer on the morning and everything that grew was perfectly still in the breathless air they get over there on what they call a nice cool day.”
Chandler leans hard on this device of how the other half lives as the novel moves along. Fortunately, he has a lot to say and an amusing way of saying it. Also, the story is a good one, with plenty of twists and turns laid out in a careful, comprehensible way that flows together well.
The High Window is one of my happiest surprises in recent reading, as it did a lot to upend the negative impression I had of Chandler after reading Farewell, My Lovely. I was expecting more misanthropic misery accompanied by wisecracks and a high body count. There are wisecracks, and a few bodies, but The High Window showcases Marlowe as quite considerate of others, a “shop-stained Sir Galahad” as he is dubbed.
The class angle emerges as a central theme, early and often. Rich characters typically lord it over the working class, who in turn scrabble for what they can. Marlowe sets himself apart with an air of fractured nobility and a refusal to lower his standards when it comes to money:
“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 $25 a day is too much.”
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| The Murdocks reside in a tree-shaded mansion like this just outside downtown Los Angeles. "Nobody walked in that neighborhood, not even the mailman," Marlowe tells us in his first-person narration. |
At the Murdock house, Marlowe also meets mousy Merle Davis, who works for Mrs. Murdock in a largely servile capacity; and Leslie, Mrs. Murdock’s son. Leslie’s wife, lounge singer Linda Conquest, disappeared recently; Mrs. Murdock suspects she took with her a rare and valuable coin, the Brasher Doubloon.
The doubloon works as the novel’s MacGuffin. People want it, devise elaborate schemes around it, and end up dying over it. Yet Mrs. Murdock, the rightful owner, isn’t so concerned about getting it back as she is about making sure Linda stays gone. She’s got a lot of issues:
“That’s a smart ruthless woman, Marlowe. Whatever she’s got you doing, it’s not what she says. She’s up to something. Watch your step.”
She is also hard on Merle, with whom Marlowe takes an affectionate interest as the story moves on. This brings up an aspect of The High Window which impressed me more as it went on, the way the narrative lens zooms in on to secondary characters.
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As an avid Ed McBain reader, I have grown to like this “everyone-has-a-story” approach in crime fiction, people emerging from the background to engage, amuse, and perhaps further the plot. I just wasn’t expecting it from Chandler. Here Marlowe gabs with an elevator operator, a security guard, a chauffeur and others who are happy to talk. In the process we learn a bit about what makes them tick.
One character, a fellow detective named Anson, proves hapless at his job trailing Marlowe, and seems there for comic relief. But Marlowe takes a liking to the guy; even letting Anson cry on his shoulder:
“It’s a pretty tough dollar in this town,” [Anson] said sadly. “You can’t do it on foot, you ruin yourself with taxi fares if you use taxis, and if you use your own car, it’s always where you can’t get to it fast enough.”
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| Raymond Chandler and friend, around the time The High Window was published. Like his creation Philip Marlowe, Chandler enjoyed smoking a pipe. At least he enjoyed being photographed with them. Image from https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0151452/?_ssoLoop=1 |
As the narrative develops, the resolutions involving Anson and others, however tangential, have a cumulative impact on the plot. It’s a less obvious feat of the writer than his rapid-fire assortment of Bartletts’s worthy witticisms, but impressive.
More
impressive still are the word pictures Chandler paints in and around Los
Angeles, circa early 1940s. Lurid nightscapes and quiet mornings are described in
vivid yet terse detail:
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, sit the old men with faces like lost battles.
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| The Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, as it looked around 1950. In The High Window its people are depicted as "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..." Image from https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-grand-avenue-time-line-2019-htmlstory.html |
There are only seven Raymond Chandler/Philip Marlowe novels; of them you have three recognized classics (Farewell, My Lovely, The Big Sleep, and The Long Goodbye) and four others, including this, that aren’t rated so high. So why did I prefer this so much over Farewell?
I think it’s just a better story. Farewell has attitude and witticisms and a lot of those descriptive juices Chandler fans love, but the plot is tangled and stupid while the characters seem shock effects more than people. I couldn’t wait to leave them behind. The High Window has an enjoyable serio-comic flavor and biting social commentary that keeps you at high readiness even when there is a lull in the mystery.
Walking through a fancy party, Marlowe remarks on how plush everything is: “You could just manage to walk on the carpet without waders.”
At another point, Marlowe reminds someone: “Class is a thing that has a habit of dissolving quickly in alcohol.”
Mrs. Murdock often reminds Marlowe of his place as hireling:
“Mr. Marlowe,” she said in a deadly voice, “you are skating on very thin ice.”
I waved a hand. “Aren’t we all?”
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| Marlowe sneaks in and out of several offices during the course of The High Window, lending a vaguely lonely and creepy ambiance to the narrative. Above, a similar feeling embues the Edward Hopper painting Office At Night (1940). Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_at_Night |
The High Window is one of only two original Marlowe novels not reassembled from multiple short stories; while choppy at times an underlying logical spine connects the pieces. The plot does branch out over time, but Mrs. Murdock and her missing coin remain at the center. You aren’t getting three disconnected short stories stitched together to fill up a book, which can be a real handicap for a mystery.
Calling it a mystery seems right, even though I am often stuck on whether a detective novel belongs in a broader crime fiction category. While criminal activity takes place continually, it’s about uncovering a mystery, not the whereabouts of the doubloon so much as what is going on at Mrs. Murdock’s house, and how that led to a string of murders.
There
is a police element to the story, specifically Detective Lieutenant Jesse
Breeze, who has his eye on Marlowe after he reports one of the murders. Breeze
says he knows the private eye is holding out on him, and he is, but Marlowe’s
not being a wiseguy. He explains his motives in a manner that gets back to the
class issue at the center of the story:
“Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine. Until you guys can be
trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth
out and find it and let the chips fall where they may – until that time comes,
I have a right to listen to my conscience, and protect my client the best way I
can. Until I’m sure you won’t do him more harm than you’ll do the truth good.
Or until I’m hauled before somebody that can make me talk.”
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| Released the same year as The High Window, Time To Kill borrows the plot but changes the detective's name from Marlowe to Michael Shayne, played by Lloyd Nolan. Marlowe's big-screen debut would come two years later in the much-better known Murder, My Sweet. Image from https://www.der-film-noir.de/v1/node/1931 |
As the story develops, we learn law is a matter of who can afford it most. While not a vocal leftist like his contemporary and fellow pulp writer Dashiell Hammett, Chandler had some bitter feelings about capitalism and rich people from years of struggling to make it in journalism and the oil business. Much of that comes through in The High Window, where justice depends on who is committing the crime.
Despite all that, isn’t a downbeat book. There are many grace notes scattered throughout, and the tone isn’t morbid. At one point Marlowe explains that “the law, whatever it is, is a matter of give and take... like most other things.” He finds some common ground with the cops who hassle him, and makes things right with Mrs. Murdock and Merle, if in an unsettled sort of way.
Not one for happy endings, Chandler here doesn’t aim for despair.
The weakest element rests in the final resolution. The plot point that connects to the book’s title centers on a ridiculous coincidence, and there are a couple of criminal characters who seem too eager to lend Marlowe a hand.
But
in the main the story holds up well enough. Chandler said he viewed his fiction
as mood pieces where plots were afterthoughts. That was a problem for me with Farewell,
My Lovely, but here I enjoyed the ride. Maybe it was because my
expectations were lower, but I do think it shows Chandler blossoming as a first-class
novelist.
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