Description

‘Everything was quiet and sunny and calm. No cause for excitement whatever. It’s only Marlowe, finding another body. He does it rather well by now. Murder-a-day Marlowe, they call him . . .’

Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is hired to find a missing woman. Derace Kingsley’s wife ran away to Mexico to get a divorce and marry a hunk named Chris Lavery. Or so the note she left her husband says. Trouble is, when Philip Marlowe asks Lavery about it he denies everything. But when Marlowe next encounters Lavery, he’s denying nothing – on account of the two bullet holes in his heart. Now Marlowe’s on the trail of a killer, who leads him out of smoggy Los Angeles all the way to a murky mountain lake . . .

The Lady in the Lake is Raymond Chandler’s fourth novel featuring laconic PI Philip Marlowe.

‘Chandler’s best novels carry the crime story to levels of artistry that have rarely been matched’ Daily Mail

‘Chandler grips the mind from the first sentence’ Daily Telegraph

‘One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards others still try to attain’ Sunday Times

‘Chandler is an original stylist, creator of a character as immortal as Sherlock Holmes’ Anthony Burgess

Publisher Review

Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious -- Robert B. Parker * The New York Times Book Review * Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since -- Paul Auster Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude -- Erle Stanley Gardner [T]he prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision -- Joyce Carol Oates * New York Review of Books * Raymond Chandler is a master * New York Times * Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye * Los Angeles Times * Anything Chandler writes about grips the mind from the first sentence * Daily Telegraph * Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . A great artist * The Boston Book Review *