The High Window

By: Raymond Chandler, Mark Billingham - introduction

Narrated by: Scott Brick

Brought to you by Penguin.

'He lay crumpled on his back. Very lonely, very dead.
The safe door was wide open. A metal drawer was pulled out. It was empty now. There may have been money in it once.'

Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe's on a case: 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. It becomes more complicated when Marlowe finds that everyone who handles the coin suffers a run of very bad luck: they always end up dead. That's also unlucky for a private investigator, because leaving a trail of corpses around LA puts cops' noses seriously out of joint. If Marlowe doesn't wrap this one up fast, he's going to end up either in jail or in a wooden box in the ground . . .

The High Window is Raymond Chandler's third novel featuring laconic PI Philip Marlowe.

'Chandler's books should be read and judged, not as escapist literature, but as works of art' W.H. Auden

'Chandler grips the mind from the first sentence' Daily Telegraph

'One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards others still try to attain' Sunday Times

'Chandler is an original stylist, creator of a character as immortal as Sherlock Holmes' Anthony Burgess

© Raymond Chandler 1989 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Critic reviews

Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious (Robert B. Parker)

Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since (Paul Auster)

Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude (Erle Stanley Gardner)

[T]he prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision (Joyce Carol Oates)

Raymond Chandler is a master

Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye

Anything Chandler writes about grips the mind from the first sentence

Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . A great artist

Cool, sharp, and utterly satisfying — Marlowe at his finest

The High Window delivers exactly what I love in Chandler’s world: a rich, moody atmosphere and a mystery that unfolds with quiet menace.

Marlowe’s investigation is a masterclass — he reads people like books, flips every situation to his advantage, and somehow makes even the most dangerous characters bend to his will. He’s never just reacting; he’s always in control, even when everything seems to be falling apart.

The way the mystery slowly tightens around greed, family secrets, and power is so elegantly done, and the dialogue crackles with noir brilliance. Chandler never misses. Another 5-star entry in this phenomenal series.