CHANDLER, Raymond. The Lady in the Lake. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1943.
8vo. Original light green cloth with dark green lettering to front board and spine, rough edge pages, original illustrated black and purple dust jacket with a photograph of the author to rear wrapper; pp. [viii], 216, [2]; slight bumping to head and tail of spine and offsetting from pastedowns, general fading to rear panel and small tears to head and tail of dust jacket spine, "The Holliday Bookshop" label stamped to rear pastedown, otherwise very good.
First edition.
The Lady in the Lake involves the mysterious incident of a missing woman in a small mountain town nearly 100 miles from Los Angles city (an unusual choice of geography for Chandler's detective novels). It is the fourth to feature renowned detective Phillip Marlowe.
Often referenced as the inventor of the hard-boiled detective genre, Raymond Chandler employed the term "cannibalized" to describe his method of collating short stories into novels, recycling and expanding upon on them, particularly in The Lady in the Lake (which finds inspiration from a short story of the same name, "Bay City Blues" (1938) and "No Crime in the Mountains" (1941).
Significantly, the film adaption of 1947 creatively manipulated its cinematography to represent subjective perspective, with detective Marlowe barely seen except as a reflection, a method which was not well received by an audience that craved the iconic temperament of the novel's famous protagonist.
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