Description

A CLASSIC NOVEL BY THE MASTER OF HARD-BOILED CRIME, THE HIGH WINDOW IS RAYMOND CHANDLER’S THIRD STORY FEATURING LACONIC PI PHILIP MARLOWE.

‘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 . . .

‘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

Publisher Review

Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious -- Robert B. Parker * The New York Times Book Review * 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 * New York Review of Books * Raymond Chandler is a master * New York Times * Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye * Los Angeles Times * Anything Chandler writes about grips the mind from the first sentence * Daily Telegraph * Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . A great artist * The Boston Book Review *