Ben Winch's Reviews > The High Window

For those of you who haven’t yet read Chandler, I’m here to tell you, the man can write. You read him for the words, for the atmosphere, not for plot. The High Window itself has nothing special to recommend it; it’s another instalment, one of many roughly equally as good. (First time around The Lady in the Lake was my favourite; my wife, who read them all this year, liked The Long Goodbye.) But it’s the one I re-read last week (cos it’s tight, short, cuts to the punch) so it’ll do.

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-storey 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. [...] There were two open-grille 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.

Thing is, Chandler (it seems) could churn out this stuff in his sleep. Every building’s a Belfont Building, or as vivid; every elevator operator a Civil War veteran, or as colourful; every character – from the “long-limbed languorous” showgirl (“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.”) to the “hard boy” (“A great long gallows of a man with a ravaged face and a haggard frozen right eye that had a clotted iris and the steady look of blindness.”) – as realised as can be for as long as their in sight. And here’s the clincher: “in sight”? So who’s watching? Probably the greatest near-non-entity hero/anti-hero short of Kafka’s K., P.I. Philip Marlowe, who puts the “eye” in private eye, whose gaze, thanks to British poet turned Black Mask pulp-magazine workhorse Raymond Chandler’s near-impossible deftness, is as sharp and resplendent as they come. How does he do it? Give this hard-bitten hard-boiled hard-drinking tough guy such eloquence? It’s something to see. And somehow, though (or because) we know virtually nothing about him, this fragile word-edifice that is Marlowe convinces us utterly. We love the guy. Who cares if the plots barely add up, or if by the time they do we’re past caring? When he talks tender to the femmes fatales I defy you (women especially – Chandler, against the odds, and despite low-grade ingrained chauvinism indicative of his times, is a ladies’ man) not to feel a shiver. It’s limited in range; but for the slightest tweaks it never changes, but for what it is it’s of a very high order, beyond Hammett (Chandler’s inventor), beyond genre, unique (despite the imitators) as few so-called genre writers ever have been. When at the end of The High Window he drives the innocent young woman victim to her parents’ home in Wichita and says goodbye, I almost teared up at his laconic summation:

I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.

Sure, maybe that’s all Chandler is, a poem he’s forgotten. But what a poem! It could break your heart.