THE LADY IN THE LAKE

As much as I loved my two months with Dickens, it’s a joy and a relief to move on to Raymond Chandler. While his voice may be just as distinctive as Dickens’, his descriptions as vivid, and his characters as colorful, it’s such a relief to read his clear, direct, unabashedly twentieth-century prose. While Dickens did encompass violence, corruption, sex, and moral depravity, you had to wait around for it, or dig through several layers of propriety to figure it out, but here it’s out in the open and it’s awesome. I adore Chandler’s writing: muscular, action-packed, hard-boiled but often beautiful, bittersweetly funny, occasionally just bitter, and drowning in alcohol. Not to mention that (a) he writes so intimately about Los Angeles, now that I live here it just adds to the fun (see the joke about Pasadena’s legendary heat in the quotes below); and (b) I’ve got a crush on Philip Marlowe about a mile long (tough, lonely, sad, morally compromised, a standup guy trying to survive a crushingly dirty world…swoon!). I’ve read the early Chandler already—The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, and his short stories—so this month I’m tackling the later four books. (How I love authors with manageable oeuvres! Austen, Forster, Fitzgerald—just a handful of novels to read before you become a completist.)

Forget the plots—no, seriously, I’ve already forgotten the plots of all the Chandler books I’ve read. The plots aren’t the point. Famously, when the screenwriters of The Big Sleep called on Chandler to unravel a tangled plot detail for them, even he wasn’t able to do it. The point is the atmosphere, particularly that hard-boiled, wisecracking, simile-ridden private-detective narration that has been so frequently imitated and parodied in a million noirish books and movies since. Here are a few gems from The Lady in the Lake, which I finished yesterday. For maximum effect, imagine all of them being read to you in the voice of Humphrey Bogart:

• “She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don’t much care about kittens.”

• “His head with the hat off had the indecent look of heads that are seldom without hats.”

• “I got home about two-forty-five and Hollywood was an icebox. Even Pasadena had felt cool.”

• “Grayson was a long stooped yellow-faced man with high shoulders, bristly eyebrows and almost no chin. The upper part of his face meant business. The lower part was just saying goodbye.”

• “I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nose-dived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads.”

• “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.’”
  

• “Degarmo swung his head hard at him. ‘What about this scarf, fatty? Isn’t that evidence?’
  ‘You didn’t fit it in to anything—not that I heard,’ Patton said peacefully. ‘And I ain’t fat either, just well covered.’”

• “‘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.’”