The Lady in the Lake

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

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.