Backlisted - The High Window by Raymond Chandler

Episode Date: April 4, 2016

Raymond Chandler's 'The High Window', his third book featuring world weary detective Philip Marlowe, is introduced to Backlisted by Mojo magazine's Andrew Male. Plus the joys of walking in the rain in England, remembering Anita Brookner, and JG Ballard's unintentional mind games...Timings: (may differ due to adverts)4'38 - Rain by Melissa Harrison13'58 - Latecomers by Anita Brookner21'53 - The High Window by Raymond Chandler* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Summer's here and you can now get almost anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? You can't get a well-groomed lawn delivered, but you can get chicken parmesan delivered. Sunshine? No.

Some wine? Yes. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. See app for details. Things that characterize Batlisted without us meaning to. I remembered after we were talking about Ballard's work routine last week that I met JG Ballard once. We did an event with him at the bookshop that I worked in. This was in the early

90s and the event was a signing and it took place on a Saturday afternoon at two o'clock. Ballard turned up, was delightful. At two o'clock we sat in behind the signing table and nobody came. behind the signing table and nobody came my manager made us all go put our coats on and go down the fire escape and come in the front of the shop to queue up to get for ballard to sign some books anyway after we'd all been around once and dane was thinking about sending us through again ballard said i don't he said oh i don't think this is really working, do you? He was ever so nice, and off he went, he went home. Two minutes after he left the shop, this is true, a black cab screeched to a

hall outside, and out of the back clutching a pile of novels by J.G. Ballard came Brian Ferry. And we had to go, sorry Brian, you've missed him. He's terribly disappointed. I'm very disappointed in that. You can't believe that Brian Ferry and J.G. Ballard

would not have already spent long evenings together, would you? The worlds of music and the worlds of books. Unless Ballard had a grudge against Ferry and it was all part of Ballard's grand plan. Ferry should be arriving about. Anyway, I don't think this is working of course it all makes sense now

it's not impossible, did you see the brilliant in the controversial punk exhibition that Joe Corrie has kind of come out against I think sort of mildly on his side though I can see that the idea that punk has been non-stop rebellion, I think, is tricky.

The country life, butter ads, you know, that kind of thing. But what they had did was that great for and against thing, the poster that they had, things they like and things that they were against. I can't remember who it was. It was on a legendary T- it was and who wrote it? Bernie, what's his name? Bernie Rhodes

and one of the things that they didn't like was Brian Ferry on there there were quite a lot of things that they didn't like Brian Ferry was on and I remember that kind of ill judged there was an illged anti-punk single that Ferry did on The Bride Strip Bear,

the name of which I can't quite remember. Isn't that terrible? But it was just the idea of now feeling that you need to take a stand against Brian and Ferry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, John, have you got your introduction? Yeah, I have. I hope it's here. Yeah, it is. My God, look at that.

Shall I say the magic words? Hello and welcome to the Backlisted podcast. Today we're gathered in the library of our sponsors Unbound, the website who bring authors and readers together to create good things to read. I'm John Mitchinson, breeder of old pigs, wild bees and good books. Are you? I thought you were an entrepreneur. That's this nonsense.

Who doesn't read it before speaking? And I'm Andy Miller. I'm the author of the Year of Reading Dangerously. And we're joined, as we are every week, by author and absentee member of the team, Matthew Clayton, who actually isn't here. Not yet, but he is on his way. We hope he's only stuck on a train. So we're starting and then we're carrying on. And following our executive decision to make you concentrate, everyone, we're continuing our policy of only booking guests

with the same name as one of us. Last show it was John Niven, and we're joined for this episode by writer and associate editor of Mojo magazine, Andrew Mayle. But you can tell us apart, because first of all, I call myself Andy, only my mum calls me Andrew. And second of all, would you speak, say a few words, Andrew? Nobody calls me Andy. It's interesting, isn't it?

There are definite Andys and there are definitely Andrews. It's like Matts and Matthews. But you'd think that I'd object to the fact that Andy is called an Andy, or I'd simply object to him because he is an anti, and I only side with Andrews, but I'm absolutely fine with Andy Miller being Andy Miller. He has other reasons to object to me. And Andrews' book choice, which we'll be talking about in a moment,

is The High Window by Raymond Chandler. But first, John john what have you been reading this week i have been reading a very soggy but inspiring book called rain four walks in english weather oh yeah i really want to read this actually i'm saying that up front i ought to put all kind of cards on the table i'm a huge fan of melissa's novels clay and Hawthorne Time, which I think was shortlisted for the Costa last year, or this year even. In fact, it is this year, 2016, which is great. But this is non-fiction.

And only maybe today would you get away with commissioning a book on four walks in wet weather, which is what it is. It's four walks, the subtitle is Four Walks in English Weather. One in the winter, spring, summer and autumn. All of them in England and all of them in downpours. It's quite short, but it's incredibly dense and incredibly moist, as you would imagine. It's such a simple idea, isn't it? Rain, it dominates our lives in England. There's a lot of poetry and indeed the literature of rain, youeridge and Swift, is in this book.

But it is also about, I think, rather wonderfully, the memory of walking as a child. It's the idea that I kind of give you the pitch for it, which she captures towards the beginning of the book, is that its moisture changes landscape more dramatically than anything else, that moisture is essential. There is this extraordinary fact that water is the most anomalous substance in the universe.

There are more anomalies to water. Without getting into a QI list, just trust me on this. But it is also the most, as well as being the thing that is essential to life, no life can exist without it. That's why we're so interested in finding it on Mars and other various bits of the solar system.

But it is also the most destructive compound on the planet. It eats away. It is the universal solvent. The extraordinary fact that you can dissolve something in water and then heat it, and whereas if you dissolve something in acid, whatever you've dissolved, that's gone. History, you'll never see it again. You can dissolve something in water and dry off the water in there.

I mean, we know this because we used to eat smashed potatoes as children. What do you mean, used to? Don't love them. And indeed, part of the loveliness of this book is that memories of childhood and walking in the rain, there's a marvellous bit. Her dad used to take her walking rather in the same way that my dad used to take us walking, and I've actually failed, really, to persuade my children

that walking around in a cagoule in the rain is an improving thing. But she tells a story about Eleanor Catton, a Man Booker Prize winner, who'd also done a lot of hiking. Eleanor Catton's dad had given her two pieces of advice about which she had distinctly mixed feelings the first was nature looks more beautiful in the rain and the other was a view needs to be deserved and she goes on to say both ring true to me as does her ambivalence my father's most frequent aphorism when walking with her children on Dartmoor every year was rise above it.

Rise above tiredness, frequently, or steep climbs, but very often rise above rain. The six of us, you may picture us in cheap 1970s cagoules and sodden bell-bottoms, grew up loving the moors in all weathers, and it was just as well. As in an area of high ground between two sea coasts, Dartmoor does get a lot of orographic or relief precipitation particularly on its western facing slopes and on the higher ground. Nine months winter and three months bad weather as the local saying goes.

Now this interests me because we have almost exactly the same thing in my village in Oxfordshire which is which also gets a lot of the orographic which is the rain that is precipitated from hitting, in our case, the Cotswolds, which are not obviously as high as Dartmoor, but high enough. And Chew is wet backwards,

which is one of the things that people fail to... When they move to the village in the balmy summer months, they say, what's it like in the winter? It was encrypted. In the name of the village. It is wet beyond all endurance, mud forever and ever. And this book is a kind of, it's the glory of mud. And the brilliant thing, which is a bit of advice I was told,

is it never rains all day. So if you're out walking in the rain, you actually get into a rhythm of walking in the rain. The other brilliant thing is nobody else is out there. She writes about that wonderfully. The first journey is a journey in Wickham Fen. One of the lovely things is she's, in the book, she fills the narrative with words like load and car and sluice.

And then, even more extraordinarily, she's gathered together a brilliant 100 words concerning Rome. I mean, you know, we all do pelting, tipping, pouring, but there are some brilliant ones. Blunk, which is a sudden squall in southern England. Has she got mizzle? She has got mizzle. She's also got smur in Scotland, which is extremely fine.

You know that rain that gets you wet in Scotland, which you can't actually see, but you realise that you're suddenly... Soaked. The other one I like is one we used to use up in the north-east, which is thunnerpatch, which was a squall a squall with thunder or how about Wetchard, wet through after being caught out in the rain

you're right, Wetchard, get back fire again, it's a small book but it's got a massive amount, and she just writes, she's a good novelist, but some of the passages in this book I'll give you, just indulge me to give you just a tiny this is the rain falling all around us, us is almost silent

as it dimples the surface of the load but the reeds feathery pennants whisper and saturate to themselves as we pass. Deeper and more distant than the reed speech though is the rushing water sound of a breeze we can't yet feel as it hits the faraway alder and buckthorn cars. The dog trots ahead of us alert and key keyed up. While heavy rain can wash scent from the ground, moisture makes summer airborne smells more volatile. So the world she moves through today may well be denser with information. It's just lovely walking out. Simplest thing, we all do it. We walk a dog out. The thing about this book that's really interesting is that when you told me that you've been reading this i had already spotted this a

couple of months ago i thought i really want to read that and while you've been talking about it the thing is i am not a fan of gratuitous walking it seems pointless to me you you know have a you know have a go have a go oh right keep going earn the view that's not the point you've got to get to the top but but we can't see anything down here. I so wanted to read the book. You know, I love the idea of reading about walking in the rain rather than the idea of walking in the rain. That's very me, isn't it? Mediated.

You've just defined the success of nature books, though, haven't you? Well, this is what I was going to say to John. Why is this stuff, and stuff is what it is... Terrific stuff. And terrific stuff. Why is it so popular? I is what it is, terrific stuff. And terrific stuff. Why is it so popular? I think there's maybe a clue. I was quite overcome, actually, this morning when I was sort of thinking about it,

realising that my boys are getting older, and there are bits of the Lake District that are as dear to me as people. I mean, and I thought... Thoughts that lie too deep for words. I was thinking just that there's our pull quote there's the pull quote for next time and I haven't really shared them

and she writes about kids now not going outside she writes wonderfully about the idea that the zone that children live within now in the last 30 years has shrunk by 90% it had to be really bucketing

down or plashing down or whatever for my mum to say you can't go outside stay indoors but now indoor pursuits screen-based indoor pursuits yeah there's so much now more for kids to do inside i mean they don't go off catching i mean my boys a bit when they were younger but they don't sort of go out and i mean they like to walk, they love walking, the dogs are a good thing but I think maybe the nature writing is that sort of elegiac, we don't

feel close to it or we want to feel close to it but we don't. I think also you're right about children living inside but also I think people in general feel like they're too busy they haven't got time to do it and i think in the same way that people used to pay monks to pray for them because they didn't have time to do it themselves i think that people these writers like melissa

are doing this walking and nature study that other people are too busy to do so they'll buy a book they might not even read that book but they will buy a book about nature because it's like paying the monks to pray for them. They haven't got time to do it themselves. There's too many things going on too many things going on. I'm busy, I'm too busy. You will go out and you will feel bad about it and you will

buy your nature book and you will delve into it. These writers are doing the work for them and I'm not saying that's a bad thing. This is why I do all this reading so other people don't have to We take a quick pause The gentle from Porlock has arrived or from Putney anyway

I wanted to make a kind of Marlowe-esque opening but you've arrived late and mysteriously I've actually just been waiting outside for the last 20 minutes. Do you know my favourite thing on that? One of my favourite Billy Wilder, of which more are non-quotes, was he said, a man enters a room through a door, you've got nothing.

A man enters a room through a window, you've got a situation. Welcome, Matthew. Anyway, that's what I've been reading. What, Andy, have you been reading? Thanks, Matthew. Anyway, that's what I've been reading. What, Andy, have you been reading? Thanks, John. I've been reading the novel Latecomers by Anita Bruckner. I remember saying about 20 years ago to a publishing friend of mine that I felt Anita Bruckner was taken for granted

and that she would only be properly appreciated when she was dead, when there was a body of work to look back on. But actually, I was looking at how people responded to her dying and it seemed very quiet to me and it made me think perhaps i'm wrong perhaps actually anita brutner is not going to get the credit she deserves and so i thought i ought to take action in the moment and read one of her books having not read one of her novels for quite a long time i think i've read two of her novels for quite a long time. I think I've read two of her novels previously. Anyway, I bought a copy of Latecomers because it's one of the only two of her novels which is currently in print. And I have to say, I can't remember being so moved by a book, both the emotional and the intellectual control of it. It's a masterpiece, a masterpiece it's published in 1988 it's about two aging men who have been living in

england their whole lives but were both on the kinder transport out of germany and initially you think you're reading a book about a friendship and about their wives and their children very quiet very understated and as it goes on you realize what she's doing is sketching a portrait of the effect of that initial wrench from home and family and parents on a whole life in the most subtle and beautifully understated way incredibly ambitious while appearing to be merely elegant and i'd read it i was so moved by it and thought it was so fantastic and also i felt i feel quite strongly about this we were talking on the last podcast about elizabeth taylor and elizabeth taylor a perennially underappreciated author of whom our guest andrew male is a great fan and a long-term

admirer and we say about authors like elizabeth taylor i was just flicking through dj taylor's um new book the prose factory which is about um literary life in post-war england and he says about elizabeth taylor in there you know it was her great misfortune to be writing wonderful books in the era of the kitchen sink drama. And writers like the late Barry Hines as well. You know, she was just, became unfashionable. And when we talk about her now and we say, oh, she's perennially underappreciated. But we think, oh, we congratulate ourselves because we think that's a thing that used to happen. That wouldn't happen now.

I've seen it happen this week with Anita Bruckner. It's happening right now with Anita Bruckner, a wonderful, brilliant, unique novelist. Nobody writes like her. No. So, interestingly, I picked up Hotel Delac, which we have at home because Rachel, my wife, did publicity for her.

It is remarkable. I mean, it is remarkable that... And I think I told you, Andy, I bumped into a publishing colleague who shall remain nameless, who I'd said, sorry to hear about Bruckner, and he just said, oh, I just couldn't stand her stuff. And I was thinking, yeah, I suppose, knowing your taste, you probably... Whoever you are. and her stuff. And I was thinking, yeah, I suppose, knowing your taste, you probably

Whoever you are. And he said I was far more upset by the passing also sad of Peter Maxwell Davis, the composer. And it made me think exactly the same thing. And I'd read the obituary in The Guardian which really

I thought did a very odd thing. Yes, she was Slade Professor, first woman Slade Professor of Art at Slade School. That's an extraordinary achievement. She's an extraordinary art historian and writes brilliantly, particularly on 19th century, early 19th century, late 18th century painting. But picking up Hotel de Lac, it's...

I'm going to finish it. It's that extraordinary thing of somebody who is so completely in control. Yeah. And you get that very rarely with writers. We're going to go on to talk about another one in a moment, Chanda. But... And I thought, why? And I asked myself, why have I never read Anita Bruckner?

Because Rachel used to tell wonderful stories about how eccentric she was and lived on Ravita crackers and cigarettes and would go to parties for five, literally go to parties for five minutes and then leave. And she'd have a conversation with one person and she'd send a sort of note saying, so pleased I spent my time at the party with you.

I mean, she had all that eccentricity. And I thought Julian Barnes is one of the most wonderful pieces of one writer, generous pieces of one writer about another. And let's hope that will get a few people actually picking up. But did you say there were only two books in print? Well, I think, to be fair, Penguin had planned a big reissue campaign later in the year. But it so happens that in the week she dies you could you can you can walk into a bookshop and you can only buy two books latecomers or hotel du lac i have to say there's a i think i wish to

add about this um when we were recording this we just heard yesterday that barry hines the author of kes kestrel for a night has. I did a little... I had looked... I thought Andrew was taking the mickey out of me correctly for thinking I might be able to squeeze in a quick Barry Hines before I come and do the podcast. Well, I thought the same thing. What I did was watch Kez instead, which I hadn't seen. But you know what?

There's nothing in print by Barry Hines except Kez, and there's nothing that's been in print for decades by Barry Hines except Kez. And there's nothing that's been in print for decades by Barry Hines. You know, these are not insignificant writers. And I put a thing up on Twitter saying, you know, I'm doing a survey. Who amongst my followers has read any books by Barry Hines that aren't Kez?

Three? I had three replies. The Gamekeeper was the only other one I read. That was the one. There was a nice little piece by Ian McMillan recently, and he singled out The Gamekeeper and said, this is a great book that needs to be read. And you're right, it's not in print at the moment.

Maybe that would be a fun future. Yeah, it really would be, but also it begs the question, you know, why aren't they in print? So people read Kez and think, that's it, I never need to read another book by Barry Hyde? I don't know if it's true, but somebody told me that even things like The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence, they sell fewer than 300 copies a year, keeping anything in.

I don't know whether that's true. All right, but even electronically in the current era, they're just not there. One of the things that's really disappointing about e-books, which I noticed, is that there's a lot of modern trash that's in in kindle format but if you try and find classics you can find dickens and you can find george elliott but an old book by as it were elizabeth taylor or none of that stuff or faulkner i discovered that i couldn't get as i lay dying as an ebook yeah this is the very odd thing, because when the whole e-books thing came in,

I certainly thought, oh, well, all books are going to be available. It's not going to be that difficult, is it? It's like, I can get my £2.99 copy of this previously impossible-to-find book, and absolutely not. Anyway, we should all read more Anita Bruckner. More Bruckner. And more Elizabeth Taylor. More Elizabeth Taylor.

And, seamlessly, perhaps more Roman Chandler. Honestly, what could be... You know that thing where I have this fantasy sometimes I'm going to get some terrible illness that will mean I have to stay in bed for a long time? I don't know, does everybody else have it? And I will read the whole of Woodhouse, which I haven't done.

And shortly after or maybe at the same time, I would also have every single thing I think that Chanda wrote. Hey, it can't all be book chat. Smoke Chesterfields.

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I don't think I've read The High Window. I'm pretty sure I hadn't read it before, but I thought I'd read. I certainly read five or six of them. It's like being embraced by an old friend. When Andrew suggested we read The High Window, I think if you'd said... This is like a couple of months ago. I think if you'd said to me, which famous novelist's third novel was The High Window,

I wouldn't have known. I'd never knowingly heard of it. And I hadn't read... I hadn't read a book by Raymond Chandler since I read The Big Sleep, his first book, when I was 13. And I have to say a massive thank you to Andrew because my great pleasure over the last six weeks has been effectively discovering Chandler properly for the first time. I thought I knew what Raymond Chandler was, but I didn't. So, Andrew, what is it for you

that made you want to make us read The High Window? For very similar reasons. I bought, probably about 20 years ago, when Penguin first brought out their collection of all the six novels, there was one, there was kind of three in one book and three in the other, And the high window stood out. The first two novels, The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, they're entrenched in genre.

Chandler was educated at Dulwich College in the classics. And you can tell that he approached hard-boiled genre fiction in the same way that he must have approached Latin and Greek. He learned everything and he got everything right right he's a scholar of this stuff but you read the first two books and they are perfect works of kind of assimilation you know he's read his dashiell hammett hammett was a he worked for the pinkton agency and he wrote court reports he wrote police reports that's why hammett's so good at sort of those detailing of events. When was Hammett writing? Was he writing a lot earlier than Chandler?

It's probably about a decade earlier. Yeah, yeah. And that's what Chandler took from Hammett, because if you read the early Chandler short stories, they're all over the place. Every two pages you have two guys coming in with guns, and one of them dies and another one runs off. And they're a mess.

They're a joyous mess, but they're a mess you know they're a joyous mess but they're a mess but he read the sam spade books he read the confidential age continental op books and he got this kind of methodical approach from them and you read the first two novels and he's got it down pat already i mean that's the thing when you kind of look through the short stories in the early novels there's only about two or three short stories before he's got the style down. I mean, he's a quick learner. We're going to talk about this when we get onto the bio, but he writes for a magazine called... Black Mask. Yeah.

So the first two novels are completely entrenched in the genre. They're masterpieces of hard-boiled fiction. And the later novels, after he started working in Hollywood and after he started drinking heavily, are much more kind of full of cynicism and self-loathing and a kind of a sort of search for the point of why am I doing this, especially The Long Goodbye, the last book. You know, there's another character in there

who's a writer of romantic fiction, and they're all different versions of Chandler. We should just say it's not the last book, but it feels like the last book. The last book is Playback, which was adapted from a screenplay, and just feels like a kind of a last gasp. But The Long Goodbye is the last book

before his wife dies, and he tips over into full-blown alcoholism and suicide so the high window sits in the middle i think the high window is unlike any of the other books it feels much more still there's it hasn't got that sort of breakneck speed of the first two novels but also there's that real sense of chandler being aware of the fact that he's lived in hollywood since the early 20s and he's seen it change and this is the first novel that he writes that is actually about the hollywood that he lives in and the way in which this real city has been overtaken by fakeness by hollywood itself by the by the movies but also new money and so the thing that's fascinating about the high window is nothing is real in it

you know everybody is speaking movie lines you know know, Marlowe says at one point, pictures, that made them talk like that. You can't trust the way anyone speaks. You can't trust their appearance because there's something doubtful behind it. Everything is a pose and a fake. Everything is surface. There's no depth.

I mean, even the MacGuffin at the centre of the book, eventually... Hang on, whoa, whoa. We need to read the blurbs. Oh, OK. there's no depth I mean even the MacGuffin at the centre of the book eventually hang on we need to read the blurbs oh ok we need to read the blurbs because otherwise people are going to you know the thing about Chandler is

the plots are convoluted yeah we have to be very we need to say something we have to stick to our spoiler rules yeah absolutely but we need to say something

very important about plot in Chandler but read the blurbs ok so what we're going to do we're going to read we were going to read one blurb. We're actually going to read two blurbs. So this is a blurb off the back of a 70s Penguin edition of The High Window. Here we go.

And incidentally, we're going to try and have an embargo on this episode of Humphrey Bogart Impressions. John. Mrs Elizabeth Bright Murdoch wanted to hire a nice clean private detective who wouldn't drop cigar ashes on the floor and never carried more than one gun she had lost a rare coin the bracer doubloon she knew who had stolen it and she hired marlo to get it back as quietly as possible because mrs murdoch had a lot to hide even from marlo the coin turned up all right but the search uncovered a string of murders and an elegant blackmailer and marlo was in a fix and that's pretty good i think right okay well here is the blurb off the back of my

yeah you read the other this is the this is the blurb off the back of uh 1960s edition okay without it started with something it started with some business about a rare coin. Everybody knew who had stolen it, but nobody was anxious to do anything about it. Marlowe couldn't understand why the old lady had hired him. She didn't seem to like detectives and she didn't want to tell him much. So he started to think about her, and then about the pale, fragile, frightened little girl who was her secretary

and then about her son which led him to the gambler and then to the gambler's luscious and lustful wife and then to the elegant blackmailer and so this case became a study of character for even when murder was done even after the second murder character was the root of everything

I think that's great, somebody's read that isn't that good my god they look can i can we just say this is an exquisite looking uh what was he called the great penguin uh what's tishbowl no no he was the guy tony godwin he was the kind of the who's running penguin that's an amazing it's got the green livery but it's an amazing jacket and that's a great blurb i'm gonna put a little photo up of our various editions of The High Window. Yeah. So people can see the decline and fall. Yeah, I'm not even going to read the contemporary blurb.

Nah, two blurbs is sufficient. Andrew, you were saying just then, one of the things that this book is about is character. And one of the characters is L.A. Yes, absolutely. I think you had a bit to read in there. When I suggested this book, I remembered one passage from it, and it's a description of a place in L.A.

that isn't there anymore called Bunker Hill. And the other interesting thing about it, it's where Chandler and his wife Sissy first moved to when they moved to Los Angeles. So this is, he's seen it change, and this is how it is in 1940 yeah bunker hill is old town lost town shabby town crook town once very long ago it was the choice residential district of the city and there are still standing a few of the jigsaw gothic mansions with wide porches and

walls covered with round end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets they're all rooming houses now their parketry floors are scratched and worn through the once glossy finish and the wide sweeping staircases are dark with time and with cheap varnish laid on over generations of dirt in the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide, cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles. In and around the old houses, there are fly-blown restaurants and Italian fruit stands, and cheap apartment houses, and little candy stores where

you can buy even nastier things than their candy and there are ratty hotels where nobody except people named smith and jones sign the register and where the night clerk is half watchdog and half panda out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer men with pulled down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cup's hand, the shield's match flame. Worn intellectuals with cigarette cuffs and no money in the bank. Fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes. Kokis and coke peddlers.

People who look like nothing in particular and know it. And once in a while, even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide, cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them. Oh, it's beautiful. It's so good. I have to say, the descriptions in the book, of the many great descriptions, I mean, Mrs Murdoch is fabulous

with her kind of drinking port and sitting in the gloom. I mean, this is the classic, the Linda Conquest, where she looked like a photo and not like it. She had the wide, cool mouth, the short nose, the wide, cool eyes, the dark hair parted in the middle and the broad, white line between the parting. She was wearing a white coat over her dress with the collar turned up. She had her hands in the pockets of the coat and a cigarette in her mouth.

She looked older. Her eyes were harder and her lips seemed to have forgotten to smile. They would smile when she was singing in that staged artificial smile. But in repose, they were thin and tight and angry. Brilliant. I've also got to say there's a great thing that Chon does. I'm going to give my

two brief selections. Simply, he knows how to land a gag oh yeah he's so funny from 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class from 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away I mean that's

and there's also this bit I looked at the ornaments on the desk everything standard and all copper a copper lamp, pen set and pencil tray a glass and copper ashtray with a copper elephant on the rim. A copper letter opener. A copper thermos bottle on a copper tray. Copper corners on the blotter holder.

There was a spray of almost copper coloured sweet peas in a copper vase. It seemed like a lot of copper. I mean, you know, it's wonderful. But I also love the way that he played with the genre in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A bit after the bit that John just read. What I like about this place is everything runs so true to type, I said. The cop on the gate, the shine on the door,

the cigarette and check girls, the fat, greasy, sensual Jew with the stately, tall, bored showgirl, the well-dressed drunk and horribly rude director cursing the barman, the silent guy with the gun, the nightclub omen with the soft grey hair and the B-picture mannerisms. And now you, the tall, dark torture with the negligent sneer, the husky voice, the hard-foiled vocabulary.

She said, is that so? And fitted her cigarette between her lips and drew slowly on it. And what about the wise-cracking snooper with last year's gags and the come-hither smile? But that's exactly what Andrew was saying about it being everybody's playing a part.

You know, everyone in LA. Nothing is real. I mean, they even say to Marlowe, you know, there's a bit where Marlowe cracks one of his, albeit fantastic, jokes. And Murdoch says, not good, Marlowe. Not even fresh. Yeah, yeah.

But Andrew, you were saying about him, he finds his voice and he's gradually trying to move away from the hard-boiled genre. I found this brilliant quote from him. He said, when you write in a hard-boiled magazine, you have to stick to the formula because that's why people are buying it and they want to read it. And he said, some of us try pretty hard to break out of the formula,

but we usually got caught and sent back. It's only in the novels that he can begin to move towards what he he does in the high window and then on again in the later there's a lovely motif all the way through as well that sense of kind of what is real and what isn't and oh yeah as a as a as a classic scholar as well you can you can draw parallels with them through the looking glass because constantly marlowe is checking himself in the mirror and he doesn't recognise, or it's almost like he doesn't quite recognise the person he sees

or the person he sees in the mirror is more real than the person on the other side. He stepped through the looking glass. I mean, there's a really lovely bit. There's loads of little gags once you know that thing. Like, once he arrives at the mansion, one of the first things he meets is a dog called Heathcliff. Yeah, yeah.

And so, you know, it's like Marlowe is Lockwood. It's like, you know, he arrives at the big house and everything goes to hell. You know, everything suddenly becomes more strange and gothic and wrong. Someone could say, oh, you're reading too much into it. But it's there all the way through, all these

little points that says this is an unreal world this is marlo stepping through the looking glass it's an unreal world that he has to try and piece together a story of truth and let's say the reveal is brilliant three quarters of the way through this book you have no clue how the hell he's going to extricate you're still thinking what about the he's got one of the doubloons yeah how is it just in terms of technical the ability to to write a plot that keeps everybody guessing brilliant but you realize that what he's doing is much dark i mean he's doing something far more ambitious and he what you say is the surface of things the reflections the motif every time he goes and visits Misenberg,

he packs a little doll of a little negro. Hey, pal, I figure you're the most real thing there is around here. He's the authentic character, yes. And even his own self-doubt, he is himself a cliché when he's playing that role. The police are always doing what the police do in Chandra books, which is going for the lowest, you know, the path of least resistance. But there's a passage towards the end, which I just thought was...

Before we read another passage, I think we should... I want to do the Chandler biog. Yeah, let's do that. So, Raymond Chandler's born 1888. He grows up in England, and most significantly, he lives in Croydon for a while. Up in Norwood. Up Upper Norwood, like all the best people do. And he went to Dulwich College.

He wasn't quite there at the same time as P.G. Woodhouse, but he really was. Is Upper Norwood the posh bit of Croydon, just so I get this right? It's not as posh as it would have been when Chandler lived there. Yeah, it was genteel. Yeah, I mean, it's a beautiful house. It's near where I live. If I'm walking

up to Crystal Palace, I pass Chandler's house. It wasn't as posh as the bit of Croydon I lived in. Sorry, one thing, the Dulwich College thing is, I do wonder if Chandler was taught English by the same teacher who taught Woodhouse, because of that mastery of the sentence. And, you know, you do think, were they taught by the same guy? Because there is that you can draw the parallel. So he didn't go to university,

became a reporter for the Daily Express. He wrote poetry, fought in the trenches in the First World War, began a relationship with and subsequently married Sissy Pascal, a married woman, 18 years his senior. By 1931, Chandler was a highly paid vice president of the dabney oil syndicate but his alcoholism absenteeism promiscuity with female employees and threatened suicides all contributed to his dismissal a year later what what manual appraisal

coming in sit down where do you see yourself in five years' time? He's an alcoholic. He gets fired at the height of the Great Depression. One important thing to say about him working at the Dabney Oil Syndicate is that he was an auditor there. I mean, people compare him to Dashiell Hammett and say, well, Hammett worked for the Pinkertons.

Hammett investigated people. Hammett had the real experience. And people say about Chandler, he didn't have the experience. It's not true. He was investigating people who worked in the oil syndicate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Procedure. Yeah, exactly.

What was the oil syndicate? It was Get Rich kind of struck oil in Los Angeles and everyone making a lot of money for themselves and a lot of people skimming the money off for themselves as well. It's Chinatown, Matthew. It's... Somebody did say that Chinatown is a Chandler novel. It's the Chandler

novel that he's working towards because the other thing to say about The High Window, sorry I'm interrupting you, Andy, but it's the first novel where the corruption exists outside of the family. If you read The Big Sleep and you read Farewell, My Lovely, these are corrupt families.

It's all within the sort of rich families. But here, there's a point in The High Window where Marlowe literally stops the novel to tell you this story, which he calls... The Cassidy case. Yes, the Cassidy case. And the Cassidy case is based on a real case, a real cover-up case,

where this rich guy shot his servant and they made it look like the servant shot the rich guy. And it's so weird when you get to this point in the book because it's like everyone stops. It's like Marlowe says, OK, before we proceed any further, I've got to tell you this story. It's like a soliloquy, isn't it?

It is totally like a soliloquy. Almost fourth-world breaking. and it's basically like him saying no one can be trusted I wonder if we could hear the we were talking about LA and we've got a short clip of Chandler being we'll say something about this in a minute, Chandler being interviewed

by Ian Fleming on the subject of LA so let's just listen to that now California had been written about a book called Ramona a lot of sentimental slop but nobody in my time

had tried to write about a Los Angeles background in some realistic way of course now half the writers in America live in California. Because Nathaniel West did, I think, didn't he? At least... Well, he came along much, much later. Yes, he did. That's quite true.

Well, I... As far as my material is concerned, I'm afraid I just get mine by going to places and taking down copious notes, because I can't remember anything. Yes, but you're an experienced journalist. Well, I think that's the answer. Yes.

And then I learned my writing. You can go to Las Vegas, and you can get Las Vegas in a few days, except the ice water. Right. Oh, yes, you complained about some of our, one of the meals that my James Bond ordered in Las Vegas. He described the meal and I didn't get him to wait to spring the ice water the first thing. I've made no complaint. Well, that amused me because that's the

first thing that happened to me in the American restaurant. I kicked out a glass of ice water. I don't wish to... I'm suspecting a number of cool drinks have been taken by both parties. I think so. What were you saying? People think the editing on this show is loose. I'm suspecting a number of cool drinks have been taken by both parties. I think so. What were you saying? As that goes on. People think the editing on this show is loose.

There is a fantastic point in that interview where Fleming says that he can write a novel in three months or something, and Chandler gets really annoyed. Chandler goes, what, three months? You can write a novel in three months? I wrote a novel in four months, but three months? Three months? You're writing a novel, it takes me forever right now.

Three months? Because obviously the longer it went on, the harder Chandler found it to write his novels. Even though, to use his word, they were cannibalised from the short stories, but it just became more and more difficult. You know, that's funny because that story also has a mirror in the experience that he had when he first went to hollywood he works on the script of double indemnity yeah with billy wilder and billy wilder

tells a brilliant story in his paris review interview of when they met with chandler so billy wilder said we'd love to work with you on the adaptation when can we expect the script and chandler said this is friday do you want a week from monday holy shit we said we usually took five to six months on a script anyway he came back in 10 days with 80 pages of absolute bullshit so he could when he was working on the pulps he's not the most prolific writer but he clearly has it's funny you were talking about the big sleep the first novel and farewell my lovely the second the high window is the first book i believe where he isn't reusing elements of plots from the short stories right he's not. Pearls are a Nuisance, I think, is referenced in The High Window. But it's the first one where he's actually set out to try and write

something that is removed from the short stories. Interesting. It's interesting you mention Wildler, because the book that convinced Wildler to let Chandler work on Dublin Demons, he was The High Window. And it's actually one paragraph in the high window, which I've bookmarked. Excellent.

In the swivel chair at the desk sat an elderly party in a dark grey suit with high lapels and too many buttons down the front. He had some stringy white hair that grew long enough to tickle his ears. A pale grey bald patch loomed high up in the middle of it like a rock above timberline fuzz grew out of his ears far enough to catch a moth and it was that line it was that line that just knocked wilder's socks off he said who else writes like that far enough

to catch a moth it is brilliant it's wonderful one of the things i think is interesting about the high window as well which you know as we've said remains in some obscurity by quite a famous writer is that the big sleep had been a quite a big success yeah and farewell my lovely had not been such a success and this one tanked yeah this was book three yeah this didn't this was a flop i've got a quote from charlie here he said he wrote somebody saying the thing that rather gets me down is that when i write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder i get panned for being tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder and then when i try to tone it down a bit and develop the mental and emotional side of it at the situation i get panned for what i was panned for putting in in the first place. And it's talking about exactly

this book. It is much more, I think, the whole thing, the psychology, the character of Merle, which we won't go into any detail because she's essential to the plot. His sensitivity in dealing with her and her psychological affliction is way beyond pretty much

anything in fiction of this kind until you get to P.D. James and Ruth Rendell. It's much more... I love that after he's dropped her off for reasons that we can't go into, there's a great line, I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.

I mean, that really... You know what? Get that out of any other thriller writer. One of the things that I found reading these Chamba novels, like the bit you just read, John, clearly the genre and his style owes a great debt to Hemingway. And yet, did Hemingway ever write a sentence as good as that? I could be convinced he didn't.

You know, there's a kind of humility to it that you don't get in Hemingway. Or at least Hemingway is more concerned about fronting up to the reader and being in control with the reader. Chandler could write a very good, and did write a very good Hemingway parodies. Is that right? I didn't know that. The whisky tasted good.

It tasted damn good. That's the cuss place. I mean, the gap between them is not very big. I think that's the thing. He knows where Hemingway edges into parody and I think he stops himself from doing that. Or he brings humour into it. His similes, because his similes are so you know

they vault over hemingway don't they you know they are so grand and funny you know they don't they don't always work no but he has that lovely thing when you read one of them i i often and i did think several times in the high window he's put that in and he's made himself laugh on a rough morning absolutely you know and you know you know how chandler wrote he wrote on little bits of yellow paper that could only hold 11 or 12 lines so that he could be sure that on in every paragraph or couple of paragraphs there was something absolute dynamite on every page and it's exactly the reason why you get that rhythm yeah yeah i watched the the only original script that Chandler wrote for a film called The Blue Dahlia.

And it's a lousy film held together only by Chandler's genius for one brilliant line after another. It's badly acted, it's badly shot. The plotting is all over the place because Chandler hadn't finished it when he started it. He didn't know what was going to happen and yet, bouncing from line to line

you go, whoa what a magnificent thing after that more importantly, he told the studio that he had to get drunk to finish it Alan Ladd had to go into the army so they had something like, basically the time to finish it was so short, and Chandler

basically told the studio, the only way I can do this is to get raging roaring drunk for two weeks and so it was written in the contract and he had secretaries on standby to kind of transcribe any kind of drunken shoutings that he made and it basically was probably the thing that kind of contributed most to his early death that major drunk that he went on to write the Blue Dahlia and he hated the film he referred to the female lead after he watched the film as Moronica Lake

so as Andrew was saying after the Blue Dahlia and after his wife dies he begins the pretty speedy descent into alcoholism, and the last years of his life are pretty grim, all things considered. I wonder what Chandler was like to deal with.

Andrew, who said to me after, like, three episodes of Batlist, he said, you know what this podcast should be called? Oh, they're poor agents. I mean, I don't know who Chandler's agent was, but presumably... Well, he... His final agent, he proposed to her they were going to get married,

but this is what Chandler did after Sissy died, and he'd made a lot of money by then from the movies. He effectively went on a grand tour, and lots of people wanted to meet Chandler because they thought they were going to meet Marlowe. You know, they thought they were going to meet this very witty, very handsome, very suave gentleman. And they met this antisocial, sentimental drunk. But an antisocial, sentimental drunk who any woman who took it upon themselves to look after him or feed him or anything,

he thought that they were going to propose marriage to him so i think he proposed marriage to sonia orwell he did i think he proposed marriage to natasha spender as well and so anyone who sort of took him under their wing he thought and i think it's sad because i think it's obviously because he's without sissy and he's looking for another sissy he's looking for another another mother figure you know i mean that's the other thing as well i mean it's interesting what you say about the the women in the high window because he has a very odd relationship with old women because i think he disliked his mother because his mother stopped him from marrying when he's younger yeah so mrs

murdoch is chandler's mother but as there's also kind of that, you know, that sense that he wants to kind of save and take care of a lot of these women. And it's the... The Merle subplot, his looking after her and taking her in when she needs it, I mean, it's a remarkable... It's the romantic thing. I mean, this is the book in which he's called

A Shop-Soiled Galahad. And it's interesting about the... I mean, I won't give anything away, but the passage in which the title of the book is revealed, the word The High Window, is remarkable. But also I was, you know, basically The High Window is a popular motif in romantic paintings. Chandler wanted to be a romantic Gothic novelist.

He'd have known about Caspar David Friedrich, you know, and the image of The High Window in it. And also the other thing is Larkin read crime books. Yeah, yeah. So I'm thing is larkin read crime books so i'm convinced that larkin took the high window yeah because and also you can draw parallels is that sense of kind of ideals and emptiness vision and light and then the fall optimism and decline all the things that are in high windows the poem i mean you can pull out of this book if you want to. But the main thing is, I think, that Chandler, as a scholar of gothic romantic novels...

You were talking about the novel titles in the last week with the information. The book that Chandler wanted to write was called An English Summer Brackets, A Gothic Romance. English Summer, also the title of a great lost Rolling Stones single from 1967. Yeah, but this was the novel that he put all his hikes in.

And there's this terrible thing he writes down that everything will be sorted out when he writes this book called An English Summer, a Gothic Romance. And Sissy transcribes it, and Sissy at the bottom of this piece of paper goes, Raymond, one day you'll look back on this and laugh at all your hopeless dreams yeah can i just say one one more thing the genius in these books which could you know we've talked a lot about the style we've

said how funny it is we've said how a flip it is everybody's playing a part you know the thing that that you know to use the uh leb term, the rug holding the room together, is the fact that in all these books, death really matters. When somebody dies, Marlowe really feels it, and you, the reader, feels it, that this is not an insignificant thing. This is not another guy being plugged. This is a thing that could and should have been prevented. That

changes things. And as somebody who'd been in the war, the way he writes about dead bodies, the way he writes about how dead bodies look, the way in which the foot is facing the wrong way, they're horrible. The back of Marlow's neck goes cold and he goes quiet

and it's hit him. You mentioned Larkin there's huge melancholy I just wanted one last little bit if I think of Chandra I think of Marlowe on his own in a room

so I drove back to Hollywood bought a pint of good liquor checked in at the plaza and sat on the side of the bed staring at my feet and lapping the whiskey out of the bottle

just like any common bedroom drunk when I'd had enough of it to make my brain fuzzy enough to stop thinking i undressed and got into bed and after a while but not soon enough i went to sleep that not soon enough yeah yeah that's really good i mean it's i just think the thing as well john that you said at the beginning one of the things one of the blessings and the curses of doing this podcast is if I could spend the next fortnight

reading everything else Roman Chandler wrote and the letters, he wrote great letters the letters of these journals so I've got one last question for Andrew Andrew and I are both not a euphemism, we're great admirers of film musicals we like a film musical

and we're both great admirers of the works. We like a film musical, right? And we're both great admirers of the work of Gene Kelly. So, Andrew, given everything that we've talked about with The High Window, its commercial prospects, its style, if The High Window were a Gene Kelly film, which Gene Kelly film would it be? What? What?

An American in Paris. Ooh. Because... show your workings it is him stepping outside of the genre it's not pure genre yeah to step outside it's infused with melancholy but it also has ambition to be something more than the genre that it's been labeled as an. An American in Paris. You know what I was going to say one, but forget it. No, no, no. I was going to say Invitation to the Dance. But explaining why

I would say Invitation to the Dance is stretching the patience of anybody listening to this too far. So you and I can talk about it. Please write in for a fact sheet. To show Andrew, if you can't show your workings andy maybe other people could supply your workings for you that just about wraps up backlisted for another episode thanks to andrew male thanks to andy miller thanks to matthew and of course thanks once again to our sponsors un. You can get in touch with us on Twitter, at BacklistedPod, on Facebook, on the BacklistedPod page,

and on the Unbound site at unbound.co.uk forward slash backlisted. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. Until then, farewell, my lovelies. Thanks, everyone. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early,

you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.