The High Window by Raymond Chandler

This was the third of the eventual seven novels that Raymond Chandler wrote about his detective Philip Marlowe, published in 1942. It's the one about the Brasher Doubloon, though I tend to think of it as "one of those four in the middle." (Chandler started with The Big Sleep, and hit his peak with The Long Goodbye more than a decade later before petering out with the disappointing Playback. The four novels between Sleep and Goodbye are all strong, but I tend to mix them up, especially when I haven't read some of them in decades.)

The High Window is the only Chandler novel not to be based on previously-written material, if I can trust Wikipedia. It does show, actually: both Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely have a clear "two cases that intersect" structure, as Chandler stitched together elements from what were originally separate stories. High Window is all of a piece, without that bit of intersecting serendipity that so many later mystery writers, sometimes clumsily, picked up from Chandler.

In this case, Marlowe is hired by a rich widow, Mrs. Murdock, out in Pasadena. As usual, there's the ostensible reason - to find her despised daughter-in-law, Linda Conquest - and the underlying reason, that the widow assumes Linda took a valuable coin when she ran off, and that will provide leverage for her to force her son Leslie to divorce Linda.

That coin is the Brasher Doubloon, a colonial-era gold piece from New York State, old enough that it was pressed rather than minted...which will be important to the plot, eventually. A rare-coin dealer contacted Mrs. Murdock about it, asking if it was for sale - which, both Murdock and Marlowe agree, implies he's seen the stolen coin and knows who has it.

But first Marlowe has to poke around, looking for Linda and chasing her former roommate, who is now married to a gangster club owner, Alex Morny. Of course, Leslie, the wastrel rich son, is in debt to Morny for a large amount of money, and of course he still loves his runaway wife and wants her back.

And of course as Marlowe starts chasing clues and talking to people, some of them ending up dead soon afterward. Quite a number of them, and quite quickly, too - Marlowe stalls the police as best he can, but he keeps emphasizing, both in his internal dialogue and talking to Mrs. Murdock, that a man in his line of work can't just keep silent, that he'll need to explain and explicate and make connections his clients might not like.

Marlowe does solve the murders and retrieve the coin in the end - it's a mystery novel, that's how you know it is the end. More importantly for him, he saves Mrs. Murdock's neurotic and bullied secretary, Merle, from a complicated predicament and takes her back to her Midwestern parents, in what's probably the purest example of the white-knight impulse in this series.

And, throughout, the joys of reading Chandler are in the language and the observations - he had an amazing eye for understanding and presenting people with devastating clarity, and a facility for unique and telling descriptions of them and the places they lived and the stuff they surrounded themselves with. His plots are fine and generally inventive, but that's table-stakes in the mystery field. The writing and the insight is what makes Chandler Chandler, and it's still as true and precise eighty years later as it was in 1942.

(Note: I read this, like the first two Chandler novels, in the first of the two-volume Library of America Chandler collection, Stories and Early Novels. Given the absolutely horrible cover this book currently has in the US - you'll have to look for it yourself; I'm not posting it here - I strongly recommend not getting this book standalone right now.)