The high window - BookWyrm.it

Nessuna copertina — Raymond Chandler: The high window (1979, Magna Print Books)

386, pagine

lingua English

Pubblicato il 10 Settembre 1979 da Magna Print Books.

ISBN:: 978-0-86009-189-9

(1 recensione)

Fast-talking, trouble-seeking private eye Philip Marlowe is a different kind of detective: a moral man in an amoral world. California in the 1940s and 1950s is as beautiful as a ripe fruit and rotten to the core, and Marlowe must struggle to retain his integrity amidst the corruption he encounters daily. In The High Window, Marlowe starts out on the trail of a single stolen coin and ends up knee-deep in bodies. 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. But Marlowe finds that everyone who handles the coin suffers a run of very bad luck: they always end up dead. If Marlowe doesn’t wrap this one up fast, he’s going to end up in jail—or worse, in a box in the ground. Starring Toby Stephens, this thrilling …

Fast-talking, trouble-seeking private eye Philip Marlowe is a different kind of detective: a moral man in an amoral world. California in the 1940s and 1950s is as beautiful as a ripe fruit and rotten to the core, and Marlowe must struggle to retain his integrity amidst the corruption he encounters daily. In The High Window, Marlowe starts out on the trail of a single stolen coin and ends up knee-deep in bodies. 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. But Marlowe finds that everyone who handles the coin suffers a run of very bad luck: they always end up dead. If Marlowe doesn’t wrap this one up fast, he’s going to end up in jail—or worse, in a box in the ground. Starring Toby Stephens, this thrilling dramatization by Robin Brooks retains all the wry humor of Chandler’s serpentine suspense novel.

24 edizioni

mikerickson@bookwyrm.social ha recensito The High Window di Raymond Chandler

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4 stelle

What a pleasure it's been to find an author that so consistently gives me exactly what I want and expect out of a detective noir.

While this is a third book in a series, there's no real continuity to worry about and absolutely holds up as a standalone entry. We got our barely-scraping-by protagonist in Philip Marlowe taking a job from a rich client who's adversarial from the jump. We got a huge cast of characters introduced in a frontloaded opening third of the story. And we got a couple of seemingly unrelated murders that all get pulled together in a complicated web of relationships. Set it in 1940's Los Angeles and give everyone old-timey vocabulary and you got a bona fide noir.

Will I remember every exact detail of this story a few months from now? Most certainly not, but I'll remember that I enjoyed my time with it, …

What a pleasure it's been to find an author that so consistently gives me exactly what I want and expect out of a detective noir.

While this is a third book in a series, there's no real continuity to worry about and absolutely holds up as a standalone entry. We got our barely-scraping-by protagonist in Philip Marlowe taking a job from a rich client who's adversarial from the jump. We got a huge cast of characters introduced in a frontloaded opening third of the story. And we got a couple of seemingly unrelated murders that all get pulled together in a complicated web of relationships. Set it in 1940's Los Angeles and give everyone old-timey vocabulary and you got a bona fide noir.

Will I remember every exact detail of this story a few months from now? Most certainly not, but I'll remember that I enjoyed my time with it, and that's good enough for me.

Argomenti

Fiction in English.