Raymond Chandler

'I want you to find my wife,' he said. 'She's been missing for a month.' 'Okay,' I said. 'I'll find your wife.' Derace Kingsley's wife ran away to Mexico to get a quickie divorce and marry a Casanova-wannabe named Chris Lavery. Or so the note she left her husband insisted. Trouble is, when Philip Marlowe asks Lavery about it he denies everything and sends the private investigator packing with a flea lodged firmly in his ear. But when Marlowe next encounters Lavery, he's denying nothing - on account of the two bullet holes in his heart. Now Marlowe's on the trail of a killer, who leads him out of smoggy LA all the way to a murky mountain lake . . . 'Chandler's best novels carry the crime story to levels of artistry that have rarely been matched' Daily Mail 'Brilliant . . . the story travels at exhilarating speed' The Times

The Lady in the Lake

The  lady in the lake

Sarah Sammis

A great classic mystery. I love the unusual first person POV film too.

Emmett

Read Chandler frequently and the trademarks of his novels become apparent: long and lonely drives, long and lonely nights, the solo detective making his way through the mire of the city, the femme fatale, brutish cops, Marlowe's sharp and witty retorts and the other characters' responses to them (varying across the spectrum of amusement and dislike). Small details, seemingly unremarkable, introduced along the way of the mystery ties up neatly at the end even though said mystery may seem unwieldy from the start to the middle as events, names and possibilities accrue. Though Marlowe's thought processes are sometimes laid bare for the reader, Chandler delights in springing a surprise deduction to the reader - I find such surprises occurring at the end of chapters so frequently across his novels that it could even be a characteristic. Or, barring that, since today's offerings of mystery do it too, perhaps a first for the detective novel, but executed more cleanly and nonchalantly than many other writers, the lack of melodrama hence contributing excellently to a signature dramatic effect by understatement. The Lady in the Lake is no exception to these qualities.

Marlowe's narrative voice however has always been the lure of Chandler's novels, that remarkable voice delivering his unaffected though heartfelt sentiment, the 'shop-soiled Sir Galahad' (The High Window). One seeks to see him in action repeatedly, repetitive though that brand of action may be - he gets hired, beaten by cops, caught seemingly red-handed doing something unlawful, breaks the law to prove something more there is to a case, trusts people who turn out to be wrong. Perhaps because the world he lives in, or rather, that world he himself occupies and represents is one of loss. His stoic romanticism (or is it romantic stoicism?), rising to the heights of poetry in the excellent medium of the first person pov, colours the mystery novel with a fatally potent atmosphere.

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Michael Hansen

Gabe Cortez

Will Vunderink

Derace Kingsley's wife ran away to Mexico to get a quickie divorce and marry a Casanova-wannabe named Chris Lavery. Or so the note she left her husband insisted. Trouble is, when Philip Marlowe asks Lavery about it he denies everything and sends the private investigator packing with a flea lodged firmly in his ear. But when Marlowe next encounters Lavery, he's denying nothing on account of the two bullet holes in his heart. Now Marlowe's on the trail of a killer, who leads him out of smoggy LA all the way to a murky mountain lake.

Claudiu

Erik Wallace

Ipek

Simon Lund Larsen

charlie stevens

Liz Prinz

A woman has been reported missing to detective Marlowe and a corpse is found in the lake. Yet it is not the body of the missing person, but that of one of her neighbours. It takes another three corpses before Marlowe winds up the affairs of a woman who is set on smashing links with her past.

The Lady in the Lake

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