By Daniel Polansky
FROM: LARB

In Raymond Chandler’s The High Window (1942), Philip Marlowe justifies refusing to assist the cops by referencing the corrupt end to a previous murder investigation:

Cassidy was a very rich man, a multi-millionaire. He had a grown up son. One night the cops were called to his home and young Cassidy was on his back on the floor with […] a bullet hole in the side of his head. His secretary was lying on his back[.] […] He was shot in the head, not a contact wound.

      Cassidy was a very rich man, a multi-millionaire. He had a grown up
      son. One night the cops were called to his home and young Cassidy
      was on his back on the floor with […] a bullet hole in the side of his
      head. His secretary was lying on his back[.] […] He was shot in the
      head, not a contact wound.

“Murder and suicide during a drinking spree,” Detective-Lieutenant Jesse Breeze replies. “The secretary went haywire and shot young Cassidy.” Marlowe disagrees:

      You read it in the papers, […] but it wasn’t so […] and the D.A. knew it
      wasn’t so and the D.A.’s investigators were pulled off the case within a
      matter of hours. […] [I]t was Cassidy that did the shooting[.] […] [Y]ou
      didn’t want the truth. Cassidy was too big.

“Cassidy” was Ned Doheny, son of the oil baron Edward Doheny, at the time one of the wealthiest men in America; and the investigator who was pulled off the 1929 case was one Leslie Turner White, who served as inspiration for Chandler’s Marlowe, and whose autobiography, Me, Detective (1936), played a pivotal if largely forgotten role in the formation of American noir. Read Rest of Article Here