Review Tuesday: The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler - #Mystery #Classic #ReviewTuesday

The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler

Penguin Books, 2005

Detective Philip Marlowe occupies a permanent place in American cultural mythology. Created by Raymond Chandler eighty-five years ago, Marlowe has become the archetype for the hard-boiled private investigator so popular in crime fiction. Down-to-earth, world-weary and cynical, he is a dispassionate and disillusioned loner who untangles the schemes and scams of people driven by greed, lust, anger and other truly deadly sins. His enduring influence was highlighted just last month, when I hosted January Bain’s City of Lies, a mystery that starts each chapter with a Philip Marlowe quote.

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Of course I’m familiar with Marlowe, not just through the countless imitations but from Humphrey Bogart’s classic portrayal of the timeless PI. For some reason, though, it took me more than seventy years to actually read one of the Chandler mysteries that feature him. I’ve finally remedied that omission. The Lady in the Lake is the fourth of the six Marlowe novels. It is dark, compelling, convoluted and immensely satisfying.

Though mysteries are not my favorite genre, I loved everything about this book. Chandler’s characters are quirky, colorful, often sleazy or depraved, but never boring. Even the bit parts shine. Marlowe plays the role of anti-hero with a deadpan attitude that hides a surprisingly strong moral center. The masterfully orchestrated plot, which involves multiple murders as well as blackmail, adultery and drug abuse, twists and turns but ultimately resolves itself without straining the reader’s credulity. (In contrast, I read an Agatha Christie mystery a week after completing this novel, and found the ending implausible and contrived.)

On top of all this, Chandler writes concise but astonishingly evocative prose. He has a talent for zeroing in on one or two critical details that somehow manage to define an entire scene. He’s also a master of dialogue that propels the story forward while elucidating character. If you pick out one or two sentences, the text seems simple and unadorned, but the overall effect sets up echoes and images in your mind.

I turned the Chrysler into the narrow road and crawled carefully around huge bare granite rocks and past a little waterfall and through a maze of black oak-trees and ironwood and manzanita and silence. A blue-jay squawked on a branch and a squirrel scolded at me and beat one paw angrily on the pine cone it was holding. A scarlet-topped woodpecker stopped probing in the bark long enough to look at me with one beady eye and then dodge behind the tree trunk to look at me with the other one.

This edition includes a fine introduction by mystery author Jonathan Kellerman. He praises Chandler’s Marlowe books for their “hypnotic sense of place”. I agree with this assessment. The Lady in the Lake also captures a particular, difficult time for the American psyche, as the country gets drawn into the horrors of World War II.

I am impressed that a novel so anchored in the past could still pack a literary punch. Although this was my first Philip Marlowe mystery, I suspect it will not be my last. Too bad there are only six of them. But that may be sufficient. Certainly it was enough to spawn a legend.