The Lady in the Lake

"I don’t know if this is true, but it always seemed to me to be the most unheralded of Chandler’s books. Everyone talks about The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye . If people are really doing deep cuts, they’ll mention things like The Little Sister , but The Lady in the Lake never seems to come up, and it’s brilliant. Just as a piece of writing, it’s fantastic. It does all the things that Chandler’s known for, but it’s much shorter than these other books; it’s a far more condensed mystery. And it does that thing where every other page there’s a twist. Every character you think could possibly have done it turns up either dead, or is completely innocent, or when you meet them they twist the book around completely. “The method of deduction informs the character. What about their past makes them solve the mystery in this way?” I also love that this book takes Marlowe out of his comfort zone. We’re so used to thinking of him stalking seedy LA streets and clubs, but this takes him up into the mountains, into beautiful bright sunshine and clean air. You almost feel his discomfort, as though he doesn’t know quite what to do with himself. And the people he meets are basically just normal people for the course of the mystery – just folk living their lives: a groundkeeper, an unhappy wife…. Not the rich people he’s used to dealing with. It feels very different to the rest of the books. Also, it might be the best plotting of all his mysteries. The resolution is fantastic, just the way it all comes together. When I was finishing up my first novel, which is renowned for being a complex novel – – I honestly thought that I had made it too complicated, and was trying to work out what I could do to simplify it, by cutting some of the threads. In the end, I just had to commit to the idea that I was writing a complex murder mystery novel, and that there would hopefully be an appetite for that – people who would want to scour every single detail. So I think you can do that. But if you’re going to write a complex murder mystery, you need to be fair with your audience. You need to recap all the way along. We call them ‘anchor points’ in our novels – a point where the reader gets everything recapped: these are the important clues, these are the important characters, this is what was said. You have to have quite a lot of skill to do that without making it look like that’s what you are doing. It has to be fed in quite naturally, and that’s tricky to do. But I think if you want to write a complicated novel, you have to do that. It’s not fair to disguise the mystery, and hope that the reader just forgets the relevant details up to that point. That’s not going to be satisfying for everybody. What you really want is for them to have all the clues, and all the ideas, all the suspects, and be making their theories – but then get to the end and be wrong, in a satisfying way. You’ve just won the game, because you presented the board to them, and all the pieces. Yes. There’s also, like, a meta- thing that happens: because I’ve read all the novels I’m referencing – all the Agatha Christies, all the Sherlock Holmeses – I know what the readers are going to expect. So sometimes I throw the trope in and twist it around, and make it do something else. That can be a red herring in itself, the expectations of the reader. But as I said, if you’re doing that thing where you have, say, a character do something massively important on page ten, and you never reference it again, then that’s not fair. What I try to do is bring that thing up, but then try to subvert and undermine it, or lead it into a different avenue. So you think it’s been resolved. “What you really want is for them to have all the clues, and all the ideas, all the suspects, and be making their theories – but then get to the end and be wrong” So, you have to think through the novel at a meta level, in terms of audience expectation. How do I throw that in, but then undermine it? What’s the actual in-universe logic? What are the characters thinking at this point? You’re always trying to plot those two things, which can be infuriating but also brilliant fun when it works."