Chandler, Raymond

The High Window. New York: Knopf, 1942.



8vo (71/2 x5 1/8 in; 190 x 130 mm). Publisher's purplish-lettered grayish brown cloth in pictorial dust-jacket; gutter and pastedowns a little browned as usual, jacket with minor creasing at spine ends, few small chips from top corners, upper flap fold rubbed.

Bruccoli A3.1a

Raymond Chandler's first edition copy of his third novel, signed in pencil "Raymond Chandler / Idyllwild Calif Aug 1942" below a small ownership stamp in upper left giving the Camino de la Costa address in La Jolla.

Orignally Chandler was going to call his third book The Brasher Doubloon, after the rare coin that sets the story off, but Blanche Knopf balked at the title, though she thought it "an absolutely magnificent yarn, beautifully done." A printing of 6,500 copies were published on 17 August, 1942, shortly after the Chandlers had moved again, this time to Idyllwild. Chandler had worked on the novel for two long years, having a difficult time of it, but it sold reasonably well for a mystery, moving 10,000 copies in the U.S. and 8,500 in the British edition (unfortunately for the publisher and author, mostly to libraries).

"She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones ..."  (The High Window)