A rich man hires Phillip Marlowe to find his wife. The trail leads to a resort town and another dead woman. Where is Crystal Kingsley? And who killed Muriel Chess? And what did Chris Lavery or Dr. Almore have to do with it?The Lady in the Lake is a tale of lies, double crosses, cheating woman, murder, and a shop-soiled Galahad named Phillip Marlowe caught in the middle of it. Chander and Marlowe set the standards for slick-talking detectives for generations to come and Marlowe is in fine form in...

UNE PASTICHE:The Last Croak[Apologies to Raymond Chandler, Bob Dylan and the Goons](For Ray and Cissy)The office of the Gillerlain Company was located in the Treloar Building on Oliver Street, near Sixth, on the west side. It was on the seventh floor. When you arrived and walked out of the elevator, you were greeted by swinging double plate glass doors edged in platinum. Even before you had passed through them, you could smell Gillerlain Regal, the Champagne of Perfumes.There were two women on t...

Crystal, Muriel, Mildred, Adrienne and Florence are the women displayed in Chandler's Hall of Mirrors, which begins with the simple case of a missing wife and quickly develops into four murders, plus a Dr Feelgood who feeds his patients drugs; and corrupt cops in Bay City, or Santa Monica, Ca., that Chandler knew all too well. I think he invented the cliche of a coshed character who wakes up with a dead body in the same room. Here it's a stiff femme fatale on the bed and she's only wearing nylon...

Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering silmite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king! Dennis: Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!The fact that I can't resist a Monty Python quote aside, the titu...

My fifth book read thanks to a Goodreads suggestion, this one from Alan Firestone. I'd never read any Chandler before, and I loved this, especially how tight and smart and stylized it all is. High marks from start to finish.

5-Stars! WOW! A masterpiece. The very best Marlowe of all. Great pacing, wonderful progression of events and clues, just enough snappy dialogue, delicious "detective-as-philosopher" quotations, genuine tension and suspense, a sprinkling of red herrings... This is the whole enchilada! Awesome!I brushed my hair and looked at the grey in it. There was getting to be plenty of grey in it. The face under the hair had a sick look. I didn’t like the face at all. I went back to the desk .... I sat very s...

This is one of my favorite of Chandlers. Might be because I was a San Bernardino County Sheriff's deputy for two decades and the story is about Big Bear Lake. (a lot like Phantoms by Dean Koonts that's set in Wrightwood). The voice, the prose in all Raymond Chandler books is what carries the story. That's why he continues to be revered and copied through the ages. Just writing about this book here makes me want to go back and read it again (for the umpteenth time).David Putnam author of the Brun...

I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long.This was my July birthday selection for the Dead Writers Society and what an excellent choice it turned out to be. Raymond Chandler was a heavenly wordsmith and I always find myself inspired by his novels. He writes Philip Marlowe with such a laconic style. Not a word wasted, but we feel we know the man despite the complete lack of personal details. Do we know anything about the guy? We meet no family members, no friends, no past history. Yet,

Looking down into the deep waters of the small lake there is movement a hand... the murky image is unclear, concealing a secret which gives this book its title, The Lady in the Lake, Marlowe watches, his stomach is... not joyful, however appearances can be deceiving. The brutish husband Bill Chess, the village drunk is arrested for the crime, the victim his mysterious mate an outsider, Muriel has been wet for a month, so well... the difficulty in identification is very unpleasant for the poor lo...

Raymond Chandler's fourth novel to feature Los Angeles P.I. Philip Marlowe involves two missing wives. One is the independently wealthy spouse of Derace Kingsley, an executive in a large firm. His wife, Crystal, who disappeared a month ago after sending him a telegram from Texas announcing that she was divorcing him and marrying her boyfriend, Chris Lavery, who has a reputation as a Don Juan. Kingsley isn't particularly concerned about that. He doesn't really love his wife; he knows that she pla...

Something Is In The WaterChandler is such a giant in the mystery genre that sometimes you forget how limited his output was, just seven full novels in his lifetime, a manuscript completed by another writer decades later, and a slew of short stories. Of course, it pretty much all revolves around his Private eye, Philip Marlowe. Lady in the Lake is the fourth novel in the Marlowe canon. Marlowe seems to always get hired by rich folks with rich folks’ problems. And that’s maybe cause as someone onc...

I have decided to take a break from my usual obsession with history to take a deep plunge into several of the classic noir detective novels by Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett. A few of these will be re-reads. Why noir? America is evenly divided between two fanatical ideologies so I guess the noir genre suits my cynical nature as an outcast, literary hermit who despises the hypocritical dishonesty and corruption of both political franchises as well as the obedient myrmidons

The Lady in the Lake (Philip Marlowe, #4), Raymond Chandler The Lady in the Lake is a 1943 detective novel by Raymond Chandler featuring, as do all his major works, the Los Angeles private investigator Philip Marlowe. Notable for its removal of Marlowe from his usual Los Angeles environs for much of the book, the novel's complicated plot initially deals with the case of a missing woman in a small mountain town some 80 miles (130 km) from the city. The book was written shortly after the attack on...

The search for a rich man's missing wife takes Marlowe out of Los Angeles to Bay City (Santa Monica) and Puma Point (Big Bear) with a brief stop in Riverside too. As usual, the plot is more tangled than a kindergartner's shoelaces, but the dialogue is snappy and witty and the characters are as colorful as a big box of crayons (the REALLY big box, with the built-in sharpener). Chandler's prose has truly matured by this fourth installment in the Philip Marlowe series but the ending is a bit too pa...

So, I have decided to finish my reading of all of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe detective novels, and this is the fourth in the series, my first reading of this one. It’s remarkable for me for two reasons; 1) I also began reading Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Martin Beck detective novels, set in Sweden, and they couldn’t be more different in tone, so I think about that all the time as I read, and 2) Chandler is known for writing about Los Angeles, but this book takes Marlowe into rural areas

I honestly like these better than Christie when it comes to the old-time mysteries. Maybe it's the Noir, but that isn't really the case for this book. We're in the boondocks, surrounded by charming small-town deputies and some more charmingly corrupt officials. Well, okay, so we're not in the city. The corruption, murder, and mystery are the same.As always, Chandler's prose is seriously amazing. The voice is everything, the interactions always amusing and often surprising, and the rest is plainl...

I should probably slow down on calling Raymond Chander a god. Novelists who write so damn well (and there are few of those) must sometimes tire of both hyperbole and the undersell too. Look. This isn't my favorite Chandler or my favorite Marlowe, and the Great and Glorious Chandler doesn't deviate too far from his script (Rich, difficult clients >> wise-cracking PI >> dame >> cops >> drinks >> California >> dead bodies >> Marlowe close to the line >> Marlowe over the line >> Marlowe wraps it all...

As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm reading detective fiction and ripping off everything of value. My story takes place in L.A. of the early '90s, but I'm traveling to all eras and hiring all manner of sleuth to serve as tour guide thorugh the City of Angels. Working my way backwards in time through the Philip Marlowe series, next up is The Lady in the Lake. Published in 1943, I found myself less interested in who shot whom from where and why this time and allowed Chandler's slowly aged and...

Raindrops on strippers and crisp apple gunshotsBright copper floozies and warm woolly whatnots, Muscular gentlemen tied up with stringsThese are a few of my favorite thingsGirls in bikinis with breathtaking lipstickSlayed belles on gurneys as fast talking dicks quipSilverwhite cocaine and fabulous blingThese are a few of my favourite thingFinding those corpses with wide ugly gashesAnd no nose at all and not many eyelashesAnd Chandler and Marlowe and slightly left wingsThese are a few of my favou...

A rich man asked Philip Marlowe to find his missing wife who presumably ran away to Mexico to get a divorce, but disappeared since then. The search quickly led the private detective to a dead body of another woman with seemingly no connection to the first one, except for them being neighbors. The number of dead bodies rapidly increases as Marlowe tries to get to the bottom of a very complicated mystery while dodging cold-blooded killers, corrupted cops (the level of corruption in Bay City seems