![]() For my money, the best of Chandler’s novels, the most explicitly class-conscious in this respect, is The High Window. In Chandler’s world, crimes are committed for profit or out of class antipathy. As he portrayed it, crime was committed by either those wanting more in a society which gives them less than they want, or by those on top who commit crimes as the way of establishing the fortune that then makes them respectable, or to maintain their position on top. Chandler focuses on a generalized corruption in capitalist society that with his other two compadres opened a space for crime novels to have a strong infusion of the social aspects of crime. This passage from Chandler’s essay explaining his technique in “The Simple Art of Murder” is dripping with sarcasm, contempt and class analysis in its explanation of how the genre had been practiced by the upper-class detectives of the Sherlock Holmes/Agatha Christie school.Ĭhandler is at pains to argue that murder and crime in general is not done for specious reasons and in a way that creates a puzzle for the detectives or as a clever ruse, or, as is still practiced in much of the serial killer literature of today, as expression of aberrant psychology.Ī new book by Ken Fuller, Raymond Chandler: The Man Behind the Mask, in its strongest moments concentrates on Chandler’s implied politics in his noir novels. ![]() As Chandler put it, he took the novel away from those who commit murder with "hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish” and returned it to “the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.” Raymond Chandler, along with Dashiell Hammett before him and Ross Macdonald after, effected a startling change in the crime novel. ( TV.Dennis Broe reviews Raymond Chandler: The Man Behind The Mask, by Ken Fuller, and discusses how Chandler and others unmasked the capitalist delusion that was - and is? - Southern California Stella pulls at the Nurse's hair and reveals that Nurse Ames is really a man and a murderer who sees Stella as his next victim. Once in the lounge, however, Nurse Ames attacks her. ![]() She heads for the phone, but stops and heads into the lounge to help Nurse Ames who has been apparently attacked. She fails to notice that it is the handyman trying to get back in. Later, Stella sees a man outside and panics when there is knocking at the door. Growing paranoid, Stella locks all the windows in the house but neglects to lock the one in the basement. When a patient's oxygen begins to run low, Stella sends the handyman out to get some. She grows more uneasy when the lights go out. Stella becomes worried when she hears that a nurse killer is in the area. The only other people in the house are a house keeper named Maude and her handyman husband Sam. Stella is pleased when another nurse named Betty Ames arrives to assist her in the work. Glendon Baker is an invalid who is being taken care of by a nurse named Stella Crosson. ![]() ![]() "An Unlocked Window" was originally broadcast on 15/Feb/1965 as part of the third season of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. ![]()
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