Two Per Cent of Nothing at All

On "The High Window" by Raymond Chandler, and "Jerzy" by Jerome Charyn

I. Nobody Cared Whether I Died or Went to El Paso

Author Read Before: Raymond Chandler
Books Previously Read: The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The Little Sister; The Long Goodbye; “The King in Yellow”; “The Simple Art of Murder”
Book Read: The High Window

I need to begin by explaining myself. As a long time reader of crime fiction, from the pulp classics to the more-or-less current crop (I’m a bit behind, I’ll admit), I have long maintained a kind of admiring skepticism when it comes to the writer generally considered to be the best to ever do it. I’m speaking of course about Raymond Chandler, creator of Philip Marlowe, the quintessential hardboiled detective, author of numerous detective novels that millions have heard of but haven’t necessarily read, which I consider to be a fairly unarguable sign of a writer’s cultural impact. Maybe not the one most craved for by the writer in question, as it’s quite possible that in addition to not having read The Big Sleep, they also couldn’t name the writer. But they know that title. They know the name “Marlowe.” And they’ve heard of Bogart, which helps.

Anyway. As I recall, the source of my contrarianism (which please understand is fairly mild as these things go; I’ve never argued, or believed, that Chandler was a bad writer) was two-fold: in the old days, I could get hung up on the absurdly complex plots in ostensibly realistic crime/detective fiction, a “fault” Chandler was certainly prone to; there is of course the famous story of the screenwriters for Howard Hawks’s film of The Big Sleep contacting Chandler out of frustration over not being able to work out who killed the chauffeur, and Chandler being as clueless as them (the thing I like most about this story is picturing William Faulkner, of all people, trying to work this out).