Raymond Chandler and "The Lady in the Lake".

Chandler cannibalised several of his short stories for his novels; the short stories in question are collected in the volume "Killer in the Rain", which I've never read till now, assuming they'd just be inferior early work like the ones in "Pearls are a Nuisance". In fact they are cracking.

I enjoyed them so much that, like the writing nerd that I am, I sat down yesterday evening and compared one of them, "The Lady in the Lake", with the later novel of the same name, word for word, to see what the differences were. At first I couldn't believe what I was finding (because to me the novel is a classic): but, yes, the short story, which after all was only published in a pulp magazine, has a claim to be the better written of the two.

The opening forty pages of the two works are directly comparable – Chandler must have gone through the short story line by line, systematically expanding it – and in my opinion many of the changes he made were slightly for the worse, though Chandler's worse is still essential. Here, for example, are the openings:

{Short story}: I was breaking a new pair of shoes in on my desk that morning when Violets M'Gee called me up. It was a dull, hot, damp August day and you couldn't keep your neck dry with a bath towel.

{Novel}: The Treloar Building was, and is, on Olive Street, near Sixth, on the west side. The sidewalk in front of it had been built of black and white rubber blocks.

Less immediate, in my opinion. The novel's opening is adapted from the fourth paragraph of the short story, which itself was better expressed, I'd say (in one sentence, with no commas or tense elaborations):

{Short story}: The Avenant Building is on Olive near Sixth and has a black-and-white rubber sidewalk out front.

I could give line readings all the way through making the same point about the differences in sharpness between the texts.

But, wow. It is a thrill for me to discover, in effect, new Chandler at this late stage in my life. The description of Puma Lake was particularly atmospheric – I'd forgotten what a wonderful nature writer Chandler was:

In the open spaces grew bright green manzanita and what was left of the wild irises and white and purple lupins and bugle flowers and desert paint brush.

("What was left of the wild irises" Anyone who's seen wild irises, will, know how these huge flowers linger in rags and tatters after their first bloom, dominating wherever they grow.)

And in reading the story version of The Lady in the Lake I visualised, as I never did when I read and reread the novel, that forlorn little bandstand at the end of the hidden lake, abandoned there by a film crew that had once used the place as a film set.

All the same, the mystery in the short story, though different from the novel's, is every bit as creaky and implausible as its successor: it self-quagmires in explanations towards the end. But the technical side of puzzlemaking was never Chandler's strong point; he'd lost interest in it, thank goodness, by the time he came to write the novels.

In one of his letters he put his finger on what's wrong with much mystery writing, a genre I generally dislike (because I prefer writers to tell me the truth about their characters):

"About halfway through a book they [British mystery writers] start fooling about with alibis, analyzing bits and pieces of evidence and so on. The story dies on them."

To an extent that's what happens in the short-story version of "The Lady in the Lake"; but if I had to put any story in a writer's hand as an example of how to write action and description, it would be this one.

Today, anyway.

d.beswetherick.