In The Lady in the Lake, hardboiled crime fiction master Raymond Chandler brings us the story of a couple of missing wives—one a rich man's and one a poor man's—who have become the objects of Philip Marlowe's investigation. One of them may have gotten a Mexican divorce and married a gigolo and the other may be dead. Marlowe's not sure he cares about either one, but he's not paid to care.

Philip Marlowe marries a rich, beautiful society lady who wants him to settle down. But old habits die hard, and Marlowe soon is back in business, enmeshed in a case involving pornography, bigamy, and murder.

Raymond Chandler's incomparable private eye is back, pulled by a seductive young heiress into the most difficult and dangerous case of his career. "It was one of those summer Tuesday afternoons when you begin to wonder if the earth has stopped revolving. The telephone on my desk had the look of something that knows it's being watched. Traffic trickled by in the street below, and there were a few pedestrians, too, men in hats going nowhere." So begins...

Murder on a motorcycle, as Marlowe goes to work for a millionaire trying to protect his daughter. An iron skull was their trademark, their business was climbing walls and it was all done on wheels at 70 miles an hour but that was a cinch for the death cheaters until they felt murder and a feminine touch…

In a Mexican diamond mine, Detective Philip Marlowe must knab a thief! Get this and get it straight. Crime is a sucker’s road, and those who travel it wind up in the gutter, the prison, or an early grave. There’s no other end, but they never learn. Let me give you an example. Philip Marlowe was hired to find a thief and he did, a thousand miles from home. What he found was a fresh corpse in the closet, and all because the only woman in sight...

Why is The Heat Wave, a burlesque dancer wearing a golden mask? Marlowe's been hired to find out. Murder tries a strip tease!

The story of a mixed-up girl, and her mixed-up life and her really strange sister. The big fog that clung to Los Angeles made searching for the girl who was going to kill herself slow and uneasy, but in the end, I’d have settled for that and more because murder happened twice before I found the lady in mink…

Eddie Mallet is being followed by a gorilla in a tee shirt with muscles out-to-here. Marlowe is hired to find out why, but not soon enough to save Eddie. The partner from Mexico City, the stranger dead in Nevada and the man with the cauliflower ear all added up to a corpse on a concrete floor but Philip Marlowe couldn’t figure why until he found out that there was one name above all that had to be remembered…

Bizarre enthusiasm, unusual inheritors, $300,000 and a map are some of the details that made the radio broadcast perfect. When the will was read, everybody figured she'd been crazy when she wrote it. And that included me. But I changed my mind after spending a night on an island with a pig, a cat and an ape. Because in reality, they were people.