The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips."

Raymond Chandler's fourth novel, The Lady in the Lake (1943), is not as remarkable an achievement as The Long Good-bye or the popular favorites The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely. Yet it is a solid, engrossing, and very readable mystery with some well-developed characters, and also a novel that conveys the sense of the times.

Philip Marlowe is hired by a well-to-do businessman, Mr. Kingsley, to find his wife, Crystal, "who has been gone a whole month." She sent him a telegram from El Paso telling him that she is going to Mexico with a man she met and that she plans to get a divorce. But the man in question denies going anywhere with Crystal and her car is found in San Bernardino. Marlowe quickly discovers a connection with Kingsley's wife doctor, whose wife committed suicide some time ago. There are hints of excessive drug prescriptions.

Marlowe goes to Kingsley's cabin on the fictional Little Fawn Lake (maybe modeled on Big Bear Lake) where he meets the caretaker, Mr. Chess, who tells Marlowe that his wife also disappeared. They go on a walk around the lake and accidentally discover the drowned body:

"Then the face came. A swollen pulpy gray white mass without features, without eyes, without mouth. A blotch of gray dough [...]"

Mr. Chess recognizes his wife. I am not giving any spoilers as this is just the beginning of a very complicated plot that involves many characters and an intricate tangle of connections between them.

Several characterizations, for instance Sheriff Patton's and Miss Fromsett's, are well written: the characters are not caricatures but almost feel like real people. Even Philip Marlowe is not as cartoonishly perfect as in The Long Good-bye. On the other hand, the characterizations of Captain Webber and Lt. Degarmo are one-dimensional and not psychologically plausible.

The sense of place and time is well rendered. The fictional Bay City is obviously modeled on Santa Monica (I seemed to recognize the place even though I was there for the first time 40 years later than the time of the story). Most memorable are the references to World War II. Marlowe has to cross a dam at the end of the Puma Lake to get to Kingsley's cabin. There are sentries on the dam and the drivers are told to roll up car windows. After Pearl Harbor attack, the protection of water systems and dams was a national priority. They were military zones and to prevent sabotage twenty-four hour protection was in place; the criminal plot of the novel takes advantage of the circumstances.

On the negative side, there is an awkward, implausible scene with Ms. Fallbrook. Also, the author uses some truly cheap tricks in the denouement, like for instance:

"[...] went back to the house the next morning. That's just one of those things that murderers seem to do."

Sure, the murderers in mystery books often do things convenient for the plot. Despite the weaknesses, I recommend the novel.

Three stars.


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