I happened to be at the Minnetonka Government building getting my tabs renewed when I couldn’t help but swing into the library for a new read. I was looking for something easy and entertaining. Raymond Chandler came to mind and The High Window was sitting there nicely on the five-high shelving.
I’ve been a fan of Chandler since my twenties but am just getting around to figuring out why. First- he is a master at geographic descriptions. Not only in painting out the physical details but layering in thick colors to depict the social situation of the residents. There’s quite a long passage that I thought would be a bit much to reproduce here. So instead, here is how the author takes you to Idle Valley in just a few opening lines of chapter seventeen.
About twenty miles north of the pass a wide boulevard with flowering moss in the parkways turned towards the foothills. It ran for five blocks and died without a house in its entire length. From its end a curving asphalt road dove into the hills. This was Idle Valley.
The High Window by Raymond Chandler
The author’s real savoir-faire, however, is sliding in difficult valuations of social activity at just the right moment. Take his explanation to his haughty client, Mrs. Murdock, of the expense he would bear through mediating institutions should he keep her story to himself instead of coming clean to the police.
I got up and walked around my chair and sat down again. I leaned forward and took hold of my kneecaps and squeezed them until my knuckles glistened.
“The law, whatever it is, is a matter of give and take, Mrs. Murdock. Like most other things. Even if I had the legal right to stay clammed up- refuse to talk and got away with it once, that would be the end of my business. I’d be a guy marked for trouble. One way or another they would get me. I value your business, Mrs. Murdock, but not enough to cut my throat for you and bleed in your lap.”
She reached for her glass and emptied it.
It makes you wonder, as a reader, what came first for Raymond Chandler. Did he write the detective novels for the pleasure of his audience? Or did he write to lay out a landscape where he could fold in the types of ideas that stay with you and play in your head?
Home Economics 