Last week, I read Raymond Chandler’s fourth novel, The Lady in the Lake. Like most places now, Ferndale schools had closed, the library doors were locked, businesses had shut down, public gatherings were cancelled. Health department notices were pleading that we all to stay home, wash our hands, and stop touching our faces, which felt feeble in the face of death counts that cry out for revenge, not social nicety.
Government tests for the disease were failing and supplies like face masks and ventilators were running low with little hope of replenishment. The cage of frustration and rage snapped shut, and I fought despair. Hoping for diversion, I reached out for a worn book on my Chandler shelf. I began to read The Lady.
The diversion succeeded, but I also found insight and solace from an old novel I have read many times.
Background
Chandler was born in Chicago. His Irish mother had a sister in Plattsmouth, south of Omaha, Nebraska. The Chandler family lived there in the summers. Chandler’s construction engineer father was an alcoholic who traveled often and eventually did not return, abandoning his wife and twelve-year-old child. Chandler’s mother returned them to Britain, and, with the grudging help of relatives, enrolled the boy in Dulwich College, a London Public School that delivered a classic Edwardian education to the likes of Chandler, P.G. Wodehouse, and C.S. Forester, who each went on to please the ears of twentieth century popular literature readers.
Rather than go on to university, Chandler took the civil service examination. He placed near the top of six hundred candidates and entered the civil service. To the consternation of his grandmother and uncles who had paid for Chandler’s schooling, he left the service after less than a year to become a newspaper reporter and freelance essayist and poet. He failed at that for five years, then gave it up. He borrowed five hundred pounds, at interest, from a reluctant and stingy uncle, then embarked for Los Angeles. There, he took an assortment of temporary jobs, studied bookkeeping in night school, and eventually became an accountant at a creamery.
When World War I broke out, Chandler, a British subject, went north to Vancouver, Canada and enlisted in the Canadian infantry. When the war ended, he returned to the U. S. and was swept up in the Los Angeles oil boom. He became an oil executive. He met Cissy Pascal, a married woman and artist’s model eighteen years his senior.
Soon after, Chandler and Cissy began an affair and she quickly divorced her husband. Chandler paid for Cissy’s board, apartment, and wardrobe for several years. When his mother died, he married Cissy, worshiping her while pursuing younger women until she died in 1954. Chandler mentioned in his letters that Cissy preferred to do her housekeeping without the constraint of clothing.
In 1932, Chandler was fired for drunkenness, absenteeism, and affairs with his secretaries. He returned to his first career, writing. To learn his craft, he studied Erle Stanley Gardner’s stories and novels, outlining Gardner’s works, writing his own version, and comparing his versions with Gardner’s. Pulp magazines like Black Mask, where the hardboiled detective story was born and evolved, began to accept his work. In 1939, Chandler published his first novel, The Big Sleep.
The Lady in the Lake was written between 1938 and 1943. These dates are key to understanding of the novel. The U.S. was late in entering World War II. Canada, for whom Chandler had served in WW I, declared war on Germany in 1939 along with Britain. The bombing of London began in 1940. The house Chandler lived in with his mother, aunt, and grandmother while attending Dulwich was destroyed in the bombing.
By the time the U. S. declared war in late 1941, Chandler must have been frantic. In 1943, when The Lady in the Lake was published, Hitler and Japan were still expanding their territory. D-Day and the Normandy invasion was two years away. Men were being drafted; women labored at war time jobs in ways they never had before. WACs, WAVEs, and Rosy the Riveter were ascendant.
In retrospect, Americans think of World War II as a heroic upswell of patriotism, but that is in nostalgic hindsight. A number of popular figures like Charles Lindberg and Henry Ford, favored Hitler’s Germany, not the British and French losers.
The vote in congress for hostilities against Germany was unanimous, but until the Germans openly declared war on us, unanimity was uncertain. Congress did not move on Hitler until, provoked by our declaration of war on Japan after Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the U.S. After we entered the conflict, the country remained awash in uncertainty over events and changes to come, much like we are caught today in the COVID-19 pandemic. The fear of the future did not dissipate until success became clear after D-Day in 1944.
In the midst of this turmoil, Chandler wrote The Lady in the Lake.
Plot
The hardboiled detective novel differed in many ways from the products of the “Golden Age of Mysteries.” The Golden Age authors— Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, to name a few— wrote novels that were more genteel than hardboiled. American detectives were often down-and-out, frequently loners, and seldom polished gentlemen like Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey or Christie’s Hercule Poirot. But that was not the only difference.
Golden Age plots are dramatized puzzles and tests of wit. The best are well-dramatized and while reading them, we feel much more than the simple challenge of out-witting the detective, but at the core of these plots, they are puzzles. Catch the criminal, solve the puzzle, and end the chaos; that is the story. Skip unmasking the criminal and the story is gone.
Contrast this to the death of the chauffeur in Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall starred in the movie directed by Howard Hawkes, which is one of the best hardboiled detective movies ever made. But while preparing the screenplay, the writers could not figure out who killed the chauffeur. They called Chandler. He didn’t know, he never cared. So much for the well-wrought puzzle.
Chandler’s plots are studies in motivation and psychology, not puzzles. The Lady in the Lake has four murders, two murderers, and one accidental death. Each murder and death leads to the next as corruption and violence surges to its final end. Private detective Marlowe protects his client from the mayhem. He has no time or energy for puzzles.
When I read The Lady in the Lake last week, I was struck by something I had noticed before, but not understood: the role of the impending war in the plot.
The war intrudes and sets the atmosphere in the first paragraph of the novel:
The Treloar Building was, and is, on Olive Street, near Sixth, on the west side. The sidewalk in front of it had been built of black and white rubber blocks. They were taking them up now to give to the government, and a hatless pale man with a face like a building superintendent was watching the work and looking as if it was breaking his heart.
When I read this, I thought of a restaurant on Main Street in Ferndale where I live. It closed this week. My wife and I went there often, meeting with friends and enjoying memorable meals. We wonder if it will open again. When the war was over, rubber block sidewalks were never restored, as the hatless pale man feared.
Subtle effects of the overseas conflict appear throughout The Lady in the Lake. Service is poor because a clerk has been drafted. Resort crowds, reminiscent of current reports from the beaches of Fort Lauderdale, are nervous, frantic. They may never return to this pleasure spot again. The reader is uneasy, uncertain, threatened by something outside the plot that is never given a concrete form, but looms nevertheless.
The war is also present at the end of the book.
Here are the final four paragraphs of the novel that describe a fugitive racing over a dam above Los Angeles, a dam under military surveillance and control, guarding against sabotage that endangered Los Angeles.
“Guy didn’t stop for the sentry,” the sergeant said, and there was bitterness in his voice. “Damn near knocked him off the road. The sentry in the middle of the of the bridge had to jump fast to get missed. The one at this end had enough. He called the guy to halt. Guy kept going.”
The sergeant chewed his gum and looked down into the canyon.
“Orders are to shoot in a case like that,” he said. “The sentry shot.” He pointed to the grooves in the shoulder at the edge of the drop. “This is where he went off.”
A hundred feet down the canyon a small coupe was smashed against the side of a huge granite boulder. It was almost upside down, leaning a little. There were three men down there. They had moved the car enough to lift something out.
Something that had been a man.
This reminds me of a Yukio Mishima novel that ends when the protagonist knowingly drinks poison placed in his tea cup by a disciple. Inevitable, unavoidable, and bitter.
Without army sentries guarding the dam, the fugitive would have escaped. The story leaves no doubt of the fugitive’s guilt, but the war forced unseeing and brutal justice. Orders were executed without knowledge or empathy. We fear this rough justice. Today, doctors must soon decide who will get a life-saving ventilator and who will die gasping for air. In Marlowe’s time, it was the sentry’s trigger.
Yet, in The Lady in the Lake, Marlowe and Chandler faced and endured the war, protecting the innocent and facing the corrupt.
The guilty suffered and Marlowe’s integrity and resolve protected his client, which is the ultimate redeeming message from The Lady.