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The High Window

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About this listen

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

Classics Detective Modern Detectives Mystery Traditional Detectives Fiction Suspense

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
All stars
Most relevant
Great story and narration - will be looking for more from Scott Brick. I recommend this book

Great story

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The definitive reading of this complex Chandler classic. Scott Brick is outstanding. Pace, tone, texture, atmosphere - the listener is immersed completely in the fabric of the book. Time travel back to 1940’s Hollywood and the classic era of film noir. Simply brilliant.

Outstanding performance of one of the finest Chandler novels.

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Chandler is an author who rivals any novelist you might care to mention. Crime is not a minor genre, and Chandler proves this. The plot is subtle and needs some application in the reader to follow its workings, such is the fine texture of this work of art. Two other things contribute to the superiority of the novel: Chandler’s renowned epithets, many of them provoking a smile (even the “straight” descriptions are magnificent); and the sheer humanity of Marlowe’s relationship with the poor exploited young woman. I also like the fact that Marlowe is three-dimensional: he admits his fallibility, and sometimes confusion.
A brilliant novel!

Substantial!

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this book moves along at a good pace. i like Marlow and the period he occupies.
but this book feels like a play rather than real events. a lot of time is spent descibing facial expressions which is novel but wore thin on me.
not a bad book.
brilliantly read.

alright

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amazingly read, brilliantly written, gorgeous scenery setting! defo recommend it and the rest of the series!

Utterly incredible

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