The High Window cover art

The High Window

Preview
Free with 30-day trial
Prime logo New to Audible Prime Member exclusive:
2 credits with free trial
1 credit a month to use on any title to download and keep
Listen to anything from the Plus Catalogue—thousands of Audible Originals, podcasts and audiobooks
Download titles to your library and listen offline
₹199 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.

The High Window

Written by: Raymond Chandler, Mark Billingham - introduction
Narrated by: Scott Brick
Free with 30-day trial

₹199 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for ₹888.00

Buy Now for ₹888.00

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 Hard-Boiled Mystery Traditional Detectives

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 trouble with Audiobooks is that it largely depends on the narrator how you would perceive the characters and the story as a whole. When I first read Chandler in The Big Sleep, Marlowe came out to be a wisecracking detective who never loses his cool and delivers dialogues in a calm drooping self assured voice. At least that’s how I’d hear when he spoke in my head. And it was way cooler than Brick’s intense, sometimes shouting delivery. Marlowe is one of the coolest character I’ve ever read and it is important to do justice to him and show him how Chandler intended him to be. Narrater gets to a point when he’s shouting and it grows as the scene progresses. And then a shouting dialogue would end with “She said in her stoney voice”. And you would find yourself thinking, No sir that’s not how a stoney voice should sound like.
I recommend reading Chandler and experience Marlowe yourself.

Performance could be better

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.