The Lady in the Lake

The classic Chandler mystery, available as a Penguin Essential for the first timeDerace Kingsley's wife ran away to Mexico to get a quickie divorce and marry a Casanova-wannabe named Chris Lavery. Or so the note she left her husband insisted. Trouble is, when Philip Marlowe asks Lavery about it he denies everything and sends the private investigator packing with a flea lodged firmly in his ear. 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 LA all the way to a murky mountain lake . . .

“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

Best-known as the creator of the original private eye, Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and died in 1959. Many of his books have been adapted for the screen, and he is widely regarded as one of the very greatest writers of detective fiction.

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