The Lady in the Lake

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'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

Discover the newest addition to the inimitable Philip Marlowe series - Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne - out 6 September 2018 in hardback and ebook from Hogarth.

© Raymond Chandler 1989 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Critics Review

Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious
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
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
Chandler's best novels carry the crime story to levels of artistry that have rarely been matched
Daily Mail
Brilliant . . . the story travels at exhilarating speed
The Times

User Reviews

Book 5.0
Narration 5.0
5.0
5.0
Chandler is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His books will remain forever in the lists of novels by authors that must be read. The Lady in the Lake is arguably the best of the lot. The story has more twists than a slinky with not a single plot hole worthy of mentioning. Read brilliantly as ever by Scott Brick, characters come to vibrant life in every word within each and every phrase on all the pages of this classic noir novel. I can't recommend enough the great man's books. He's gritty, funny and utterly sublime in his tale telling.
Thomas Reilly 22/09/2025

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