How long does it take to read The High Window?
The High Window by Raymond Chandler takes about 4 hours 14 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
Part of Philip Marlowe
Previous: Farewell, My Lovely Next: The Lady in the Lake
About 4 hours 14 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1942. 231 pages, about 63,525 words. Written for children.
9 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 4 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 14 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 39 minutes |
The page count is the median across 32 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
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.
Subjects: Private investigators, Fiction, Philip Marlowe (Fictitious character), Mystery & Detective, Hard-Boiled, LITERARY CRITICISM