Philip Marlowe is hired by a cosmetics executive, Derace Kingsley, to find his kleptomaniac and nymphomaniac wife, Crystal, who disappeared a month before. She wired from El Paso to say she was getting a Mexican divorce and marrying one of her many boytoys, Chris Lavery. Marlowe interviews Lavery and discovers his neighbor, a doctor named Albert Almore, once treated Crystal Kingsley. Almore is very nervous about someone snooping around and sends a local cop to shoo Marlowe away. Marlowe learns from Kingsley that Almore’s wife committed suicide.
Marlowe talks to the caretaker of the lake cabin where Crystal was last living. His name is Bill Chess, and very soon he and Marlowe find his wife, Muriel, at the bottom of Fawn Lake. She left him a month ago after his dalliance with Crystal Kingsley, on the same day Crystal left the cabin. Muriel left a note saying she’d rather be dead that live with Bill any longer. The local newspaperwoman tells Marlowe that two weeks before Muriel disappeared, an LA cop named DeSoto was looking for a woman named Mildred Haviland, whose picture could have been that of Muriel Chess, with different hair and eyebrows.
The local constable, Jim Patton, and Marlowe find a locket hidden in a sugar box in Chess’s cabin that is engraved “From Al to Mildred,” clinching the fact that Muriel was Mildred Haviland. Patton has arrested Bill Chess, and has found Muriel’s car, with full suitcases in it, hidden in a nearby abandoned garage. Marlowe thinks the locket and the searcher for Mildred Haviland indicate that Bill was not Muriel’s murderer.
Marlowe learns that Lavery met Crystal Kingsley in San Bernardino before she left for El Paso, and that he went in a cab to the station with her. But when he goes to talk to Lavery again, he finds a woman there who says she’s the landlady and who’s found a gun on the stairs. She disappears and Marlowe finds Lavery dead of two gunshots in his shower. When Marlowe tries to talk to the investigator hired by Ardmore’s dead wife, the Bay City police rough him up and arrest him; it looks like there are three murders so far, and one more before the book is very much farther along.
Chandler’s plots tend to be complicated, like this one, and his style has a lot of Los Angeles wise-guy talk, but mostly straightforward prose. One feature of it is that when Marlowe meets someone new or enters a building, we get a very detailed description. Sometimes the details help to point to aspects of character or class or taste, but often they seem to be there for no other reason than to show us Marlowe’s powers of observation. Once in a while, an allusion will come out that indicates Marlowe is not merely street-smart; a woman is described by Marlowe as pleading “like the erring wife in East Lynne,” for example. Here is an exchange that shows something of the style:
There was a desk and a night clerk with one of those mustaches that get stuck under your fingernail….Degarmo lunged past the clerk….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.”
The Lady in the Lake has a nice twist to its ending, concerning the lady of the title. I’m not sure it makes everything clear, but that’s another aspect of Chandler’s plots that people often comment on. The story goes that the people making the movie of The Big Sleep got so confused by the plot that they called Chandler to ask for clarification. Chandler told them their guess was as good as his. Another surprising feature of the ending is the quick draw that takes place as the bad guy faces off with a rural county constable in California hill country. Critics like John Cawelti and Paul Skenazy have talked about the closeness of the Western and the detective story genres, but Chandler’s high noon episode is still funny and surprising.
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