Raymond Chandler’s The Lady In The Lake – Classic Noir

The Lady In The Lake (1943) is the fourth novel by Raymond Chandler. He wrote quite a few short stories for pulp magazines before hitting it big with his first novel, The Big Sleep. That one introduced his hero, private detective Philip Marlowe, memorably played by Humphrey Bogart on the silver screen.

The Lady In The Lake is a far cry from the genteel and relatively sedate mysteries of Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie. The first word that comes to my mind is gritty. Marlowe is a tough man doing a tough job in a tough town, Los Angeles, CA. He is dogged in his pursuit of truth, and he tries to do the right thing, even when it could cost him his life. Surrounded by corrupt cops, unscrupulous businessmen, and scheming women, Marlowe never wavers from his desire to get to the bottom of the case, regardless of where it takes him.

This case begins with a high-powered executive, Derace Kingsley, hiring Marlowe to find his missing wife. She disappeared a month ago, and he received a telegram from her informing him that she was getting a Mexican divorce and marrying a Chris Lavery – a notorious young womanizer. Before too long in his investigation, Marlowe has discovered a woman who was drowned weeks ago in a lake, and who is married to doctor who provides drugs to a select clientele. This doctor lives across the street from Lavery.

Kingsley is having an affair with his office assistant, Adrienne Fromsett, whose handkerchief Marlowe finds at Lavery’s house. It’s very complicated, and the police are constantly giving Marlowe a hard time while he tries to unravel the web of deceit and corruption.

I really like Chandler’s style, especially when he describes a setting. He is the master of the unexpected yet apt metaphor and simile. Here are some examples:

On the wall there was a huge tinted photograph of an elderly party with a chiselled beak and whiskers and a wing collar. The Adam’s apple that edged through his wing collar looked harder than most people’s chins.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 184-186). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

The clerk on duty was an eggheaded man with no interest in me or in anything else. He wore parts of a white linen suit and he yawned as he handed me the desk pen and looked off into the distance as if remembering his childhood.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 1287-1288). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

The Rossmore Arms was a gloomy pile of dark red brick built around a huge forecourt. It had a plush-lined lobby containing silence, tubbed plants, a bored canary in a cage as big as a dog-house, a smell of old carpet dust and the cloying fragrance of gardenias long ago.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 2155-2157). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

A wizened waiter with evil eyes and a face like a gnawed bone put a napkin with a printed peacock on it down on the table in front of me and gave me a bacardi cocktail.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 2723-2724). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nosedived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 2900-2903). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

I got my knees under me and stayed on all fours for a while, sniffing like a dog who can’t finish his dinner, but hates to leave it.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 2915-2916). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

You get the idea! There’s also a dry sense of humor that Marlowe employs to leaven the general grimness.

Degarmo lunged past the desk towards an open elevator beside which a tired old man sat on a stool waiting for a customer. The clerk snapped at Degarmo’s back like a terrier. “One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?”
Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. “Did he say ‘whom’?”
“Yeah, but don’t hit him,” I said. “There is such a word.”
Degarmo licked his lips. “I knew there was,” he said. “I often wondered where they kept it.”
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 3143-3147). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

Plot-wise, The Lady In The Lake holds up very well. Chandler does an excellent job making sure the reader can keep all the various threads of the mystery clear, despite it being complicated. And I was genuinely surprised by a major plot twist near the end. The Lady In The Lake is an example of American noir fiction at its very finest. Even though it is set in 1940s LA, it could just as easily happen today.