#NewYearNewBooks
#MissingPerson
@Eggs
@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks
Not a “new“ book, but definitely one with a missing person! 🤩
pickI listened to the audio of this one with my husband and we both thought it was great. We kept pausing it to share theories over who we thought was the murderer and how things connected. It was a tightly crafted mystery, just excellent.
pickA mix of tawdry & art and I love it. No matter how grim or gruesome, there‘s always some description that delights, making this a fun read. The California atmosphere is palpable. The intricate plot isn‘t too fast to miss Marlowe‘s moments of introspection, showing us that beneath his blasé crust is a man holding onto hope that decency will rise above the artificiality and muck of a country morally decayed and consumed with the pursuit of pleasure.
We know she will never be available for the very fact that she‘s had sex. She will turn out to be evil, or double dealing, or truly pure but sacrificed at the altar of Good in a bleak world of Evil. The only good option is the one you let go in the first third of the novel, the beautician/reporter (which tells you all you need to know). Marlowe knows where to find her if he ever wants to be penned in by a collared deer.
She knows the difference between good perfume and cheap perfume but more importantly she doesn‘t LIKE perfume. It is the stench of a man‘s hands; a tomcat‘s spray to mark his territory. She airily rises above it. She has had sex—but you know she only did it outta misguided lurve!! But she‘ll never be attainable to Marlowe.
So then there is the unattainable Wild One, the femme fatale, the goddess of noir. She is to be worshiped and feared. These women come with A Past, meaning they have secret passions & powerful knowledge but also & importantly means they are Sexually Experienced, which titillates Marlowe. His interview is almost flirtatious, he calls “polite” society‘s bluff while loving that she‘s a part of it (she knows a cheap synthetic when she smells it!).
The tame doe is rather like the wives described by their husbands: in reach and often in the way. Wives are boring, even disposable: Muriel faithful & long-suffering; Crystal, expensive to keep, much like a bratty teenager; Mrs. Almore a money-grubbing sleaze: all are sexually available, either to their husbands, gigolos, or anyone! but no husband is faithful to these domesticated females. All eyes turn from what has been had and is easily held.
The deer metaphor an apt way to describe the simplistic & moralistic way women are depicted. Women are frequently referred to as “females,” which stresses an animalistic nature. “Little Fawns,” like the fluffy blonde telephone operator, can be amusing but are only escapism, rather like the resort. Marlowe can amuse himself flirting with the little fawn, but when it comes down to it her Bambi ways are not sustainably interesting.
So I‘m in the bathtub (a little stoned), reading, & thinking abt the 3 noticeable deer sightings: Little Fawn Lake is the weekend getaway location where (in what is either a colorful anecdote of 1940s America OR wonderfully surreal) Marlowe encounters a tame doe walking down the road in a leather collar. Later it blocks his exit and he simply goes over the railing. At night, he is startled by a wild deer, untouchable & powerful.
Chandler‘s Marlowe turns his world into laconic, disillusioned poetry. The war is mentioned on the 1st page and weaves thru the narrative obliquely. Atrocities cast a glare on the artificially of the ppl Marlowe observes, “the males in leisure jackets & liquor breaths & the females in high-pitched laughs, oxblood fingernails & dirty knuckles.” Marlowe is tough but observant, sad, sensitive. Life is a “long grim fight.”
The man was a hefty dark handsome lad with fine shoulders and legs, sleek dark hair and white teeth. Six feet of a standard type of homewrecker. Arms to hold you close and all his brains in his face.
pickOne of Chandler's best. So many twists and turns and who is a good guy or bad guy.
pickAnother great tale told by a master, Raymond Chandler. After Hammett, probably the best of the hard boiled private eye scribe.
pickClassic noir in which Marlowe looks into two disappearances that may be linked. I hope it‘s not a spoiler to say that the rejoinders are arch, the liquor plentiful, and the police in possession of questionable ethics.
The Lady in the Lake | 
