Chandler came up with the alternative title of 'The High Window' because it did point to 'the ultimate essential clue' of the whodunit plot, but he never really liked that title (Pendo 87). Chandler wanted 'The Brasher Doubloon' as the title, but his publisher, Alfred Knopf, thought that it made the novel sound 'like a boy's story' (Selected Letters 80, 317). The novel's original title illustrates Jameson's observation concerning Chandler's two plots. In his essay 'The Simple Art of Murder,' Chandler himself referred to his detective's pursuit of a 'hidden truth,' a truth not easily found because 'hidden' and if found, not always a truth that resolves a mystery (59). Jameson's critique of Chandler's fiction reflects Jameson's own concerns for how genre texts such as pulp fiction fail to exclude 'undesirable responses to a given literary utterance' (Political Unconscious 107), responses that undermine a reader's literary (and political) expectations. In the subterranean plot, as the word 'continues' suggests, closure is an illusion. In the surface plot, the riddle is solved. This pattern points to the Gothic motif in Chandler's underrated novel that makes it 'more than a tough stylized mystery.' Jameson said that there are two plots in a Chandler novel, the surface plot of the whodunit and the 'psychic drama' through which the 'social world continues to be interpreted' ('On Raymond Chandler' 644). The High Window, with its faults, was more than a tough stylized mystery' (Selected Letters 89).Ī narrative pattern that Fredric Jameson has observed in Chandler's fiction has a special relevance for The High Window. As he told James Sandoe, a critic who preferred The High Window to Farewell, My Lovely, 'I felt in sympathy with you. Yet Chandler never quite accepted this judgment. In 1949, having by this time written The Lady in the Lake (1944) and The Little Sister, he said in a letter that 'Farewell, My Lovely would be called the best of my books, The High Window, the worst' (Selected Letters 165). (1) Chandler himself had mixed feelings about The High Window, which followed hard on the heels of two novels consistently ranked as his best, The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940).

It is a tale about history lost and history found, but Philip Marlowe's reflection in a mirror in the scene that ends the novel is as opaque as Dolores Gonzales's Mexican identity in The Little Sister (1949).

More than any other Chandler novel, The High Window (1942) explores the issue of race in America as an unsolved mystery.

The high window