this most modern of the media, whose possibilities fascinated Brecht and Benjamin and not much later gener­ ated the lugubrious Adorno-Horkheimer vision of the 'culture industry'

I think, for example, of some of the truly wondrous effects in The Lady in the Lake which can scarcely be conveyed by the socio-spatial notations we have devised so far, since they derive from the swooping sense of a radical shift in worlds. Such an effect is produced, for instance, after Marlowe makes his way down from Fawn Lake, where he has discovered a dead body, explored the tourist village and the cabins, had lengthy encounters with the local sheriff, and finally interrogated the rather seedy bellhops in the hotel in San Bernadino where the fleeing suspect is likely to have spent the night. The very next day, in Bay City (Santa Monica), he visits the expensive home of one of those playboys we have already mentioned, which stands across the street from the equally expensive home (or 'office') of a shady society doctor. The shift from Fawn Lake to Bay City is so extraordinary as to make us imagine we have opened the pages of a different novel. We experience something like a generic-ontological discontinuity, a well-nigh phenomenological substitution of worlds, which cannot, for that very reason, be described in purely social terms. Lavery, for instance, has visited the lake; and the Kingsleys, whose cabin Marlowe went to see, clearly inhabit both worlds, which can scarcely be seen as city and country in the older agricultural sense, but at best in terms of an opposition between tourist industry and workplace. Still, what used to be called nature must somehow be in play here, if only because of the deployment of mountain roads and the extraordinary images of the drowned body, which first 'waves' hesitatingly beneath the water and then boils up to the surface along with accompanying objects ('an ancient rotted plank popped suddenly through the surface, struck out a full foot of its jagged end, and fell back with a flat slap and floated off [LL, VI, 499]). And the ending - the soldiers on guard on the bridge across the Puma Lake dam bears witness to an unusual semic combination of history, nature and human production rare even in Chandler.