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Title: The Lady in the Lake
Author: Raymond Chandler
Genre: Noir
Thingummies: 4.5
Synopsis: A private eye tries to track down a businessman's missing wife, finds a lot more than anyone bargained for.
Thoughts: This classic bit of noir has most of the hallmarks--world-weary detective, multiple femme fatales (at least three?), crooked cops, rising body count, enormous amounts of alcohol consumed.
Compared to the Hammett novels I recently read, Chandler's plotting is far tighter. Everything ties back. He does a good job of balancing reader knowledge, given the first person narration--at several points, the narrator knows things he keeps from the reader. Sometimes we know he's keeping something back, as he acts on knowledge we know isn't true but doesn't bother to explain. Sometimes, he simply springs it on us. Done badly, this can feel like a cheat. Here, it works. If nothing else, the narrator's an asshole. It makes perfect sense that he would deliberately bait his readers.
There's a twist at the end that I actually predicted in the first chapter. However, Chandler threw in enough obfuscation and detail that I had abandoned my original theory completely. He then brought things back around sufficiently skillfully that when I discovered I had been right all along, it was a pleasure and not an annoyance.
This is very much a product of its time. The prose is often shading into purple. The sexism is off the charts. But it's still effective, tense and surprisingly funny, in a dark and morbid kind of way. The ending is somehow exactly what you might expect. After all, it wouldn't be called noir if it were sweetness and light, now would it?
Author: Raymond Chandler
Genre: Noir
Thingummies: 4.5
Synopsis: A private eye tries to track down a businessman's missing wife, finds a lot more than anyone bargained for.
Thoughts: This classic bit of noir has most of the hallmarks--world-weary detective, multiple femme fatales (at least three?), crooked cops, rising body count, enormous amounts of alcohol consumed.
Compared to the Hammett novels I recently read, Chandler's plotting is far tighter. Everything ties back. He does a good job of balancing reader knowledge, given the first person narration--at several points, the narrator knows things he keeps from the reader. Sometimes we know he's keeping something back, as he acts on knowledge we know isn't true but doesn't bother to explain. Sometimes, he simply springs it on us. Done badly, this can feel like a cheat. Here, it works. If nothing else, the narrator's an asshole. It makes perfect sense that he would deliberately bait his readers.
There's a twist at the end that I actually predicted in the first chapter. However, Chandler threw in enough obfuscation and detail that I had abandoned my original theory completely. He then brought things back around sufficiently skillfully that when I discovered I had been right all along, it was a pleasure and not an annoyance.
This is very much a product of its time. The prose is often shading into purple. The sexism is off the charts. But it's still effective, tense and surprisingly funny, in a dark and morbid kind of way. The ending is somehow exactly what you might expect. After all, it wouldn't be called noir if it were sweetness and light, now would it?
