The Lady in the Lake

Raymond Chandler’s detective fiction centers on the broad region of Southern California surrounding the city of Los Angeles. In The Lady in the Lake, Chandler showcases the ecological and economic diversity of the area, with the story moving between mountains and sandy beaches. This novel is a departure from most of Chandler’s work in that its action is centered not in Los Angeles itself, but in relatively distant exurban communities. Each of these communities idealizes itself as a rural paradise insulated from the chaos and corruption of the city, but protagonist Phillip Marlowe quickly reveals the degree to which they are in fact deeply entangled with the politics and economics of Los Angeles. To avoid backlash from the often-wealthy communities he wrote about, Chandler invented fictional locations that closely parallel real locations (Wolfe, April. “A Map of Chandler’s Fictional LA in Real-Life LA.” Electric Literature, 2014). To inhabitants of Southern California, these locations are immediately recognizable from their descriptions.

The fictional “Little Fawn Lake, near Puma Point, forty-six miles into the mountains from San Bernardino” (121) could describe several lakes, with the most likely being Big Bear Lake. The name is almost comically parallel, and Big Bear Lake is, on current roads, 41 miles into the San Bernardino Mountains. Like Little Fawn Lake, Big Bear is an extremely popular vacation destination, with summer boating and winter snow sports. At the conclusion of the novel, Lieutenant Degarmo is killed by a military sentry at a fictional Puma Lake Dam. This most likely reflects the Prado Dam or the Morris Dam, both of which were completed at the time of the novel’s publication. Morris Dam was the site of government testing of underwater mines during the 1930s and 1940s and was therefore guarded more heavily than other dams in the area.

The Lady in the Lake also travels to the beach, visiting Bay City, a fictional city “south of Malibu” (13). The city south of Malibu, along the coast, is Santa Monica. Santa Monica is an important nexus of tourism in the Los Angeles of the 20th century, with the Santa Monica Pier and Boardwalk being considered synonymous with Los Angeles for decades. In addition, in the ’20s and ’30s, Santa Monica became home to some of Los Angeles’s wealthiest inhabitants, as well as much of the aircraft and film industries that would propel Los Angeles’s economic dominance. However, Santa Monica governance was stridently racist, using eminent domain to destroy Black-owned businesses at the behest of the white-supremacist Protective League. The Santa Monica Police Department cooperated and even led some of these tasks, highlighting police corruption and compliance with the rich that Raymond Chandler emphasizes in his novels.