CHANDLER, Raymond. The Lady in the Lake.

CHANDLER, Raymond. The Lady in the Lake. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1943.

8vo. Original green cloth, stamped in dark green to covers and spine, top edge trimmed, others untrimmed, in dust-jacket designed by Norman Reeves, retaining the price ‘$2.00’; pp. [6], 216, [2]; slight wear and toning to extremities, light offsetting from pastedowns, faint spotting to edges of textblock, jacket slightly toned, with extremities worn, spine slightly sunned and small tears and nicks to spine ends and corners; stain to inner margin of pp. 10–11; otherwise a very good, clean copy; bookseller’s ticket ‘The Holliday Bookshop … New York’ and ‘81254 – Harkness’ in black ink to rear pastedown.

First edition of the fourth Philip Marlowe novel, preceding the first UK edition by one year.

The Lady in the Lake finds Philip Marlowe investigating the disappearance of a wealthy man’s wife in a remote mountain community nearly 100 miles from Los Angeles, an unusual departure from the urban settings that define much of Chandler’s fiction. The novel combines Chandler’s characteristic hard-boiled dialogue and atmospheric prose with a more isolated and psychologically unsettling setting. It draws on two earlier stories, ‘Bay City Blues’ (1938) and ‘No Crime in the Mountains’ (1941), which Chandler reworked and expanded into the novel, a practice he described as ‘cannibalizing’.

The novel was adapted for film in 1946, directed by Robert Montgomery, who also starred as Philip Marlowe. Notably, Montgomery employed experimental subjective camerawork, with Marlowe rarely seen directly and the action presented largely from his point of view, an unusual technique for a detective film of the period.

Bruccoli, A 4.1.a.

SKU: 2121858