Paperback 91: The High Window / Raymond Chandler (Pocket Books 50118)

Paperback 91: Pocket Books 50118 (5th ptg, 1965)

Title: The High Window
Author: Raymond Chandler
Cover artist: uncredited

Yours for: SOLD (sometime in early May 2008)



Best things about this cover:

• That dude's face - absolute comedy gold
• That dude's shadow
• The fact that that dude is upside-down (rarely seen position for anyone to be in on a paperback cover). If you turn the book upside-down, that guy looks like your dad pretending to be a monster after he's had a hard day at work / a little too much to drink.
• The prissy font of the title - contrasts nicely with the imminent death of the screaming man in the grey flannel suit

This book is not officially in my collection (it sits on my ordinary bookshelf with my meant-to-be-read books), but this cover is just screaming to be in the collection. So here it is.

PAGE 123~

The room had that remote, heartless, not quite dirty, not quite clean, not quite human smell that such rooms always have. Give a police department a brand new building and in three months all its rooms will smell like that. There must be something symbolic in it. A New York police reporter wrote once that when you pass in beyond the green lights of a precinct station you pass clear out of this world, into a place beyond the law.

~RP