When you think of gumshoe detectives you’re gonna think right away of an embattled middle-aged bloke, not ugly not handsome, a cigarette dangling from mouth, tired-of-life posture in the reclining seat. This is an image that Chandler created and created well. Unfortunately, it’s been bastardised in the movies and future iterations of the gumshoe PI. Because Phillip Marlowe is a fascinating character, more than most readers give him credit for.
Yes, he is a jaded character, hilariously cynical. But I think this is normal in what you expect a private eye to be, that it becomes a cliché in popular media. But I have always like Phillip Marlowe because he has a lot of humanity to him, that he recognises beauty because he is Sisyphus, and on the walk down to retrieve his boulder he acknowledges this beauty, that he longs for peace. We can see glimpses of this in the scene before he found the lady in the lake:
“A flat-bottomed boat dangled on a frayed rope tied to a post of the pier. It lays in the water almost without motion but not quite. The air was peaceful and calm and sunny and held a quiet you don’t get in cities.”
Or just driving around Bay City:
“The air was clearer than yesterday. The morning was full of peace.”
There is something visceral to why we read these books, that there is something enjoyable about the conflict and violence which is the main thread to the fabric of the book. It is written concisely which somehow deepens the brutality. Who can forget the first time we come across the lady in the lake, disfigured beyond recognition for someone whom we think was beautiful before? There is something sickening yet the fact of it is, we can’t look away.
Chandler is known for his plot twists in his novels, and the Lady in the Lake is a good showcase of that. There are many characters here who may or may not have been involved with the death of the lady — that each character holds their own and reveals something ugly beneath the Hollywood gloss: The doctor who provides morphine as a drug as a side hustle, who for some reason has good connections with the crooked cops in the Bay Area, the cabin keeper with a dysfunctional marriage, the movie-star like toyboys who live off women.
It is the base for many film noirs, and this is where different art forms feed of each other. I see in my imagination the world of Phillip Marlowe as if I were watching Chinatown all over again. There is that repulsion that we feel when a terrible event occurs, but the fact that we are disturbed doesn’t mean that we don’t want to be. For my money, The Lady in the Lake is a more potent work than The Big Sleep.
