The Lady in the Lake

“Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get...”

In this the fourth book in series, Philip Marlowe is hired by Degrace Kingsley, a perfume company executive, to track down a piece of lost property, his missing wife. What Marlowe discovers is a web of murder, extortion, and police corruption that extends beyond the borders of Bay City, a fictional suburb of Los Angeles.

As with the other books in the series Marlowe at times resorts to means that, while effective, are morally questionable, (feeding liquor to an alcoholic for information, breaking and entering, and not show more contacting the police after discovering a body immediately etc), but generally he does his best to act with integrity in a world where greed, corruption, and apathy seems prevalent. Marlowe manages to deport himself with class and wit despite being constantly warned off, bribery attempts, and police brutality. In each case, Marlowe doesn’t rattle under the pressure. Chandler presents a world in which good and evil—black and white—are inseparably mixed, meaning that Marlowe's grey areas appear significantly less dark than those around him.

As per usual Chandler writes the story from a first person point of view meaning that everything is filtered through Marlowe’s perspective, yet the readers learn little about the man directly. This can be both intriguing and frustrating at times.

'The Lady in the Lake' is a thrilling hard-boiled detective novel that reads at a fast pace but Chandler plays it straight and doesn't try and use any unnecessary gimmicks. I was a little underwhelmed by the last book (The High Window) but here Chandler is back on top form and proves himself to be one of the best of the genre. show less

I thought that I had Chandler pegged. After reading The High Window, the third of his Philip Marlowe books, I said in my review that, by this point, readers won't be coming to these books "for anything other than lashings of style", and championed the books on these terms. But with the fourth book, The Lady in the Lake, Chandler defied my expectations and introduced a genuinely engrossing mystery and coherent plot to go along with all the style. Here, there's considerable steel to go with the silk.

It is true that the second book, Farewell, My Lovely, also had a great balance of style and substance, but even there it was sometimes hard to follow the plot. The Lady in the Lake actually – and surprisingly – allows you the reader to show more interact with the mystery. You identify clues and misdirects in the dialogue and the prose, formulate theories as to who killed who and why. Chandler is no longer pulling us through his detective's tangled web and hoping we emerge unscathed: this time we are fellow sleuths working alongside Marlowe. Indeed, it was so disconcerting to be able to follow a Chandler plot in its entirety that for a while I wasn't even sure if I liked it, as strange as that sounds. By now, I'm so used to rolling through his tangled threads and looking for some sweet simile or great melancholy passage of prose that this coherence of plot was unfamiliar to me.

It's a great strength of The Lady in the Lake that it manages to retain the qualities of previous books whilst adding new strengths to them. Published in 1943, some of the prose hints at what America was like in wartime – just enough detail to flavour the story but not enough to date it. The characters are as evocative as ever, and Marlowe still stands out as the scrappy everyman. ("A private dick can bother anybody," he says on page 20. "He's persistent and used to snubs. He's paid for his time and he would just as soon use it to bother you as any other way.") There are some chilling scenes, not only when murder victims are found (and described graphically) but also when a police corruption scene is introduced in the final act. This gives Chandler the opportunity for some great and dangerous lines. And that, after all, is what he's best at. "I'm sorry you had to walk into such a mess," Marlowe's client says on page 77. But, like Marlowe, we actually like walking into Chandler's messes, especially when they turn out not to be messes at all. show less

Another great read from Raymond Chandler! Five pages in and I was hooked and addicted! This story moves fast - once the body is found in the lake, the search intensifies! And with poor alibis, confused identities, and a dedicated Marlowe hot on the trail, the action is whip snap! I love the way Chandler writes, and a sentence like, "I gobbled what they called the regular dinner, drank a brandy to sit on its chest and hold it down, and went out on the main street.", just leaves me in awe of his writing. I'm so glad I haven't read every one of his books - yet!

Meu primeiro Raymond Chandler. Meu primeiro Philip Marlowe.
Acho que o que mais impressiona na escrita do Chandler é que ele deixa o leitor investigar e chegar às mesmas conclusões do Marlowe, é uma jornada interessantíssima e cujo twist não importa porque o leitor seguiu as mesmas pistas e já está ciente de antemão. Isso é tratar o leitor com respeito e não como fosse um policial burro, né, hahaha. Adorei.
O engraçado é que apesar do meu Marlowe favorito de cinema ser o Elliott Gould, o tempo todo ao ler o livro visualizei o Bogart, mesmo sendo o Robert Montgomery quem estava na adaptação desse livro.

*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 an episodic writer than a novelist--and occasionally approaches show more 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. show less

Another excellent installment in the Philip Marlowe series. There are some familiar workings in this one as there are in all the books, but it doesn’t feel repetitive or boring. I love to watch his tradecraft, hear his quips and wonder what he’ll find behind that slightly open door (a body? evidence of a fight? a woman with a gun? all three?). Trying to spot the liars, cheats and backstabbers is what makes these so fun. Part of the solution was easy to spot and I did, but some weren’t. The Degarmo/Mildred angle wasn’t and because it was so out of the blue, it seemed strange. I guess if I’d been paying more attention I might have spotted it, but since it didn’t really connect well it still jars. Doesn’t matter though; the show more story as a whole hung together well and was full of the usual gems -

“I gobbled what they called the regular dinner, drank a brandy to sit on its chest and hold it down…” p 49

“I decided I could lose nothing by the soft approach. If that didn’t produce for me - and I didn’t think it would - nature could take its course and we could bust up the furniture.” p 80

“After a long time his words came. They came through tight teeth and edgeways, and they scraped a little as they came out.” p 186 show less

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 show more Chandler’s most engaging works. show less