Throughout The Lady in the Lake, identity and perception are treated as weapons to be manipulated for personal gain. The clearest example of this slipperiness of identity is of the novel’s female antagonist, Mildred, whose ability to assume and then shed one false identity after another facilitates her crimes and propels the novel’s plot. Mildred is an archetypal femme fatale, a stock character common to the hard-boiled detective fiction genre that Raymond Chandler pioneered. As a femme fatale, her deceptive identities suggest a broader unease around the social performance of femininity.

The uncertainty of identity is first introduced with the corpse found in Little Fawn Lake. The effacement of its features through decomposition mimics the sexist objectification that reduces women to the features that serve as signifiers of generic femininity: For instance, Bill Chess mistakes the corpse for his wife, Muriel, because the corpse still retains its blond hair. Crystal, the woman Marlowe has been hired to find, and Muriel look very similar, as do many other blond women in Southern California. An employee at the Prescott Hotel says, “These small blondes are so much of a pattern that a change of clothes or light or makeup makes them all alike or all different” (77).