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The High Window

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The High Window

By: Raymond Chandler, Mark Billingham - introduction
Narrated by: Scott Brick
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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

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
The narrator was awesome. He did different voices for all characters and captured that noir vibe in his voice.
I'd read the book before and loved listening to it as well.

Great narration, fun book

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