*Partial spoilers ahead*

The high-maintenance wife of a perfume company executive is missing, and the exec hires Philip Marlowe to track her down. When Marlowe goes to the mountain vacation cabin where the woman was last seen, the caretaker's wife is found dead--drowned in the lake--and the plot thickens. Before he knows it, Marlowe is up to his neck in shady gigolos, shadier housecall doctors and typically nasty Bay City cops, as it becomes increasingly obvious that someone doesn't want him to put the pieces together.

The Lady in the Lake represents Raymond Chandler in his prime. It's far superior to The Big Sleep--which caught Chandler at a moment when he was still more of a short story writer than a novelist--and occasionally approaches the brilliance of his late-career masterpiece The Long Goodbye. (Especially worthy of note is the vivid portrait that Chandler paints of rural lawman Jim Patton: it's one of his finest characterizations.) Here he's a total master of his craft, making Marlowe the lonely lens through which the reader views a world that is, at best, cruelly indifferent. In that regard, The Lady in the Lake may be the Chandler book to which Ross Macdonald owed the single greatest debt. At any rate, this is one of the quintessential hard-boiled detective novels, and it's an ideal point of entry if you're new to Chandler or to the subject matter in general. ( )

Good mystery. I liked the dialogue and the creative spelling of many words (kerb, clews). ( )

Raymond Chandler, in my opinion, exceeds all other detective story writers by virtue of his thrillingly dry and low-key language, memorable characterizations, and intricate but believable plotting. But there’s something else, an undefinable quality of attitude and dialog that no one but Dashiell Hammett has ever come close to duplicating. This wonderful novel, a mashup of two splendid short stories, feels like a single original creation, so skillfully does Chandler meld the two. It involves a dead woman in a lake, another one in a garage, and a dead guy in a bathtub, and the knotty problem of who they were and how they got there. Crime fiction’s finest modern character, private eye Philip Marlowe takes on the case in one Chandler’s most engaging works. ( )

Read it again a few weeks back.

For an author, first person Point of View is a difficult voice to pull off well. Chandler is a master. Highly recommended and not just for the POV lesson, but another great plot, interesting, well-formed characters and of course Philip Marlowe.

It is a great shame Chandler only wrote seven novels (eight if you include Poodle Springs which was finished by Robert B. Parker). ( )

A missing woman, another found in a lake. Marlowe unravels a complicated mystery. ( )