Raymond Chandler - The Lady in the Lake

Raymond Chandler's novel The Lady in the Lake (1943) was pieced together from three of Chandler's earlier short stories; Bay City Blues (1938), The Lady in the Lake (1939), and No Crime in the Mountains (1941). The short stories feature Chandler's Philip Marlowe prototype John Dalmas and John Evans.

I liked all three short stories, but particularly enjoyed Bay City Blues. There is a scene in Bay City Blues that does not appear in the Lady in the Lake novel (but Chandler would rework some of it for his novel The High Window). Dalmas walks into a club.

The lobby -they called it a foyer- looked like an MGM set for a night club in the Broadway Melody of 1980.... 
The ceiling had stars in it and they twinkled. Beside the bar entrance, which was dark and vaguely purple, like a half-remembered nightmare, there was a huge round mirror set back in a white tunnel with an Egyptian headdress over the top of it. In front of this a lady in green was preening her metallic blond hair. Her evening gown was cut so low at the back that she was wearing a black beauty patch on her lumbar muscle, about an inch below where her pants would have been, if she had been wearing any pants.
A cigarette girl with a tray the size of a five-pound candy box came down the gangway. She wore feathers in her hair, enough clothes to hide behind a three-cent stamp, and one of her long, beautiful, naked legs was gilded and the other was silvered. She had the cold, disdainful expression of a dame who is dated so far ahead that she would have to think twice before accepting a knockdown to a maharajab with a basket of rubies under his arm. 

In The High Window, Chandler changed this last line to read, She had the utterly disdainful expression of a dame who makes her dates by long distance.



 Bay City Blues has plenty of hardboiled characters and women with wicked mouths. In the nightclub, Dalmas spots the woman he is looking for.

The girl at the table next to me had red hair too. It was parted in the middle and strained back as if she hated it. She had large, dark, hungry eyes, awkward features and no make-up except a mouth that glared like a neon sign. Her street suit had too-wide shoulders, too-flaring lapels. An orange under sweater snuggled her neck and there was a black and-orange quill in her Robin Hood hat, crooked on the back of her head. She smiled at me and her teeth were as thin and sharp as a pauper's Christmas. I didn't smile back.

She emptied her glass and rattled it on the tabletop. A waiter in a neat mess jacket slipped out of nowhere and stood in front of me.

"Scotch and soda," the girl snapped. She had a hard, angular voice with a liquor slur in it.

The waiter looked at her, barely moved his chin and looked back at me. I said: "Bacardi and grenadine."

He went away. The girl said: "That'll make you sicky, big boy."

I didn't look at her. "So you don't want to play," she said loosely. I lit a cigarette and blew a ring in the soft purplish air. "Go chase yourself," the girl said. "I could pick up a dozen gorillas like you on every block on Hollywood Boulevard. Hollywood Boulevard, my foot. A lot of bit players out of work and fish-faced blondes trying to shake a hangover out of their teeth."

"Who said anything about Hollywood Boulevard?" I asked.

"You did. Nobody but a guy from Hollywood Boulevard wouldn't talk back to a girl that insulted him civilly."

A man and a girl at a nearby table turned their heads and stared. The man gave me a short, sympathetic grin. "That goes for you, too," the girl said to him.

"You didn't insult me yet," he said.

"Nature beat me to it, handsome."

The waiter came back with the drinks. He gave me mine first. The girl said loudly: "I guess you're not used to waiting on ladies."

The waiter gave her her Scotch and soda. "I beg your pardon, madam," he said in an icy tone.

"Sure. Come around sometime and I'll give you a manicure, if I can borrow a hoe. Boy friend's paying the ticket on this."

None of this makes it into the novel Lady in the Lake, so you have to read the short story to get it. 

One character that makes it into two of the short stories and the novel is the smalltown sheriff. His description and dialogue are almost word for word. This shows that Chandler was sometimes  either lazy in his writing or when he liked something he stayed with it.

One thing you can be sure of when you read Raymond Chandler is that his detective will get knocked out. They must have suffered multiple concussions. One of my favorite knock-out lines is from Farewell My Lovely (1940). Marlowe narrates; A pool of darkness opened at my feet and was far, far deeper than the blackest night. I dived into it. It had no bottom.

In Bay City Blues, Dalmas gets sapped. Then a naval gun went of in my ear and my head was a large pink firework exploding into the vault of the sky and scattering and falling slow and pale, and then dark into the waves. Blackness ate me up. 

In No Crime in the Mountains, detective John Evans describes his experience. My head came off and went half-way across the lake and did a boomerang turn and came back and slammed on top of my spine with a sickening jar. Somehow on the way it got a mouthful of pine needles.
A short time later Evans gets cold-cocked again. I spun off into the distance, trailing flashes of lightning, and did a nose dive out into space. A couple of thousand years passed. Then I stopped a planet with my back ... .

I like the following exchange between Dalmas and a tough cop in Bay City Blues. It dispels the image of the tough-guy private eye.  

De Spain said: "If this guy you call Big Chin is Moss Lorenz, I'll know him. We might get in. Or maybe we walk ourselves into some hot lead."

"Just like the coppers do on the radio," I said.

"You scared?"

"Me?" I said. "Sure I'm scared." 

The Lady in the Lake short story is very much like the novel. though the solution is not the same. 

The novel has some great quotes: The self-operating elevator was carpeted in red plush. It had an elderly perfume in it, like three widows drinking tea.

However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody’s eye.

 But my favorite from the novel is: "I'm all done with hating you," I said. "It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long."

There is film version of The Lady in the Lake in 1947 starring and directed by Robert Montgomery. The movie is not exceptional save for the fact that is was filmed from the viewpoint of the central character.  

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