The High Window - bookrastinating.com

Audio CD

English language

Published Feb. 1, 2007 by Phoenix Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-59777-054-5
OCLC Number:: 123128550

Fast-talking, trouble-seeking private eye Philip Marlowe is a different kind of detective: a moral man in an amoral world. California in the 1940s and 1950s is as beautiful as a ripe fruit and rotten to the core, and Marlowe must struggle to retain his integrity amidst the corruption he encounters daily. In The High Window, Marlowe starts out on the trail of a single stolen coin and ends up knee-deep in bodies. His client, a dried-up husk of a woman, wants him to recover a rare gold coin called a Brasher Doubloon, missing from her late husband’s collection. That’s the simple part. But Marlowe finds that everyone who handles the coin suffers a run of very bad luck: they always end up dead. If Marlowe doesn’t wrap this one up fast, he’s going to end up in jail—or worse, in a box in the ground. Starring Toby Stephens, this thrilling …

Fast-talking, trouble-seeking private eye Philip Marlowe is a different kind of detective: a moral man in an amoral world. California in the 1940s and 1950s is as beautiful as a ripe fruit and rotten to the core, and Marlowe must struggle to retain his integrity amidst the corruption he encounters daily. In The High Window, Marlowe starts out on the trail of a single stolen coin and ends up knee-deep in bodies. His client, a dried-up husk of a woman, wants him to recover a rare gold coin called a Brasher Doubloon, missing from her late husband’s collection. That’s the simple part. But Marlowe finds that everyone who handles the coin suffers a run of very bad luck: they always end up dead. If Marlowe doesn’t wrap this one up fast, he’s going to end up in jail—or worse, in a box in the ground. Starring Toby Stephens, this thrilling dramatization by Robin Brooks retains all the wry humor of Chandler’s serpentine suspense novel.

23 editions

kpfssport reviewed The High Window by Raymond Chandler (Vintage crime/Black Lizard)

Enjoyable read

4 stars

I bounced off "The Maltese Falcon" but I thought I'd give this a go.

Much more my sort of thing.

I think Chandler's style allows you to have more feeling for the central character, I know that Dashiell Hammett gave Sam Spade no interior dialogue deliberately, but there's this lovely edgy flippant hidden bleeding heart to Philip Marlowe.

The plot barely hangs together but it's hard to notice that with all the characters being so richly drawn

I bounced off "The Maltese Falcon" but I thought I'd give this a go.

Much more my sort of thing.

I think Chandler's style allows you to have more feeling for the central character, I know that Dashiell Hammett gave Sam Spade no interior dialogue deliberately, but there's this lovely edgy flippant hidden bleeding heart to Philip Marlowe.

The plot barely hangs together but it's hard to notice that with all the characters being so richly drawn