I have previously proposed that the Zodiac’s Halloween Card and Pines Card jointly constitute a fantasia inspired by the SF Chronicle’s “Tahoe Mystery” article, heavily influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound — particularly the Dali dream sequence that reveals clues to a murder and a hidden body in a ski resort at Gabriel Lake. I now suggest that a second influence on Hodel’s reverie was Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake, a self-consciously Arthurian hard-boiled detective novel which revolves around the discovery of a woman’s corpse in Little Fawn Lake, a mountain resort to the northeast of Los Angeles.
The giveaway to a Spellbound influence on the “Tahoe Mystery”-related cards is the addition of the hand-painted floating eyes in the Halloween Card. That’s a relatively obvious sign or hint and it was noticed long before George Hodel ever came into view as a Zodiac suspect. An homage to The Lady in the Lake is just as natural in context, but the evidentiary hook for this theory within the Halloween Card is subtle. I suspect that it was not intended as a clue. Rather, like the Halloween Card’s almost subliminal “Lady Doom and the Death Wheel” reference,1 it is a manifestation of a private “House-Tree-Person”-style self-analysis along the lines George Hodel described in a 1962 article coauthored with a Manila churchman, the Rev. Wayland S. Mandell.
On the front of the Halloween Card Zodiac pasted a pumpkin sticker over the pelvic region of the grinning skeleton. That has a fairly obvious interpretation as a hint not to assume the gender of the skeleton. The skeleton reappears within the gate-fold — now as a paste-up addition to the original commercial greeting card. There is another person in the tableau— someone peering out of a tree, framed by the words “Peek-a-Boo You are Doomed!” Given the context, we likely have a male and a female here, but which is which? I have previously discussed George Hodel’s contrapuntal reference to two Arthurian poems in the titling of his 1924 photographic self-portrait, “Merlin Gazes at Cracked Mirrors.” In Merlin and Vivien, Merlin is lured into a forest, seduced, tricked, cursed and entombed within a hollow oak by Vivien, the Lady of the Lake — the “red-grinning skeleton of death” — who prances off in triumph. In The Lady of Shalott, a chaste lady “imbowered” on a private island breaks a taboo by peeking out of the window of her tower at the studly Sir Lancelot riding by, and is instantly doomed by a curse. She winds up floating into Camelot in a boat that serves as her bier, a beautiful corpse. That’s your entrypoint for The Lady in the Lake. It looks like George has recycled his self-analysis from 1924 for the Halloween Card.
Given his demonstrable penchant for Arthurian references, it is conceivable George Hodel drew a connection between the “Tahoe Mystery” and the Arthurian Lady of the Lake mythos without even thinking of Chandler’s novel, but I doubt it. There’s good reason for Hodel to have been familiar with the film version of the book at the very least.2 Chandler’s co-opting the “Lady of the Lake” to a murder story concerning a body in a mountain resort seems too precedential to be mere coincidence.
I don’t think the details of Chandler’s story are directly relevant to Hodel’s rehash of his idea, but they are interesting in that his convoluted plot twists, including one massive red herring, set a high bar for any homage. That’s something to bear in mind when you consider my solution to the Pines Card, which invokes a simple but very distracting head fake on the part of the Zodiac. [Plot spoilers ahead.] Private detective Philip Marlowe is hired by tycoon Derace Kingsby to figure out what happened to his wife, Crystal, last seen at the couple’s cabin in Little Fawn Lake (a fictionalized Big Bear Lake). Kingsby suspects she has taken off with Chris Lavery, a gigolo. Marlowe seeks out Bill Chess, the cabin’s caretaker. In a strange coincidence, a decomposed female body surfaces at the lake while Marlowe is interviewing him. Chess identifies the corpse as his estranged wife, Muriel, and is promptly arrested for her murder.
Nosing around, Marlowe discovers that Muriel Chess was really Mildred Haviland, a nurse who worked for a Dr. Almore, a neighbor of Lavery in Bay City (Santa Monica). It emerges that Almore is a dope-pushing Dr. Feelgood type, that he was carrying on with Haviland, and that the suspicious death of his wife was hushed up by a crooked cop, Lt. Degarmo, another one of Mildred’s lovers. After numerous plot turns and the murders of Lavery and Haviland we get the surprise reveal: the body in Little Fawn Lake wasn’t Muriel/Mildred after all. It was Crystal Kingsby. Crystal was murdered by the scheming, man-eating Mildred, who also killed Dr. Almore’s wife, using his drugs so Almore would be implicated if it wasn’t hushed up, and later shot Chris Lavery before herself being brutally murdered by the jilted and jealous Lt. Degarmo.
In addition to the play on “Lady of the Lake” in the title, many of the characters in The Lady in the Lake have Arthurian antecedents. Kingsby is King Arthur, his wife Crystal is Arthur’s straying wife, Guinevere, Mildred is very definitely the scheming harlot version of the Lady of the Lake (Vivien in Idylls of the King), Philip Marlowe is Galahad, Lavery is Lancelot,3 Dr. Almore is Merlin, and Kingsby’s assistant, Adrienne Fromsett, recalls Arthur’s promiscuous, Guinevere-hating sister, Morgan le Fay.
All very clever stuff. I doubt George Hodel would let himself be outdone in the ingenuity with which he co-opted poetic myth to his own purposes — even if, characteristically, he did pinch this idea from somebody else.
Some years ago amateur sleuths identified a connection between the Halloween Card and a 1950s Tim Holt comic book, Lady Doom and the Death Wheel. The four modes of death listed, “Death By Gun,” “Death By Knife,” “Death By Fire,” and “Death By Rope,” the Wheel itself, the use of the word “Doom” and the name “Red Mask” form a thicket of associations with the Halloween Card which strongly supports the theory of a real link. Of note, George Hodel had connections to actor Tim Holt — Holt’s biggest role was in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, directed by Hodel’s old friend, John Huston, and Holt would visit Hodel’s Hollywood home during a period when his girlfriend, Carol Forman, was a roomer there.
As previously noted, Lady in the Lake was released on Jan 23, 1947, just eight days after the Black Dahlia murder. The screenwriter for the film, Steve Fisher, claimed to have a line on the identity of the murderer: “I think I know who the Killer is … When [his] name is made public a lot of people who know him are going to be surprised and terrified.” Fisher became further embroiled in the case because the police followed his suggestion to use a false confession to flush out the real killer, possibly triggering the Jeanne French murder.
It’s also at least slightly interesting that a Lux Radio theater presentation of the movie adaptation featuring the film’s leads went out on February 9, 1948. A possible Hodel crime, the murder of realtor Gladys Kern not far from his Hollywood home, occurred five days later on Valentine’s Day, 1948. The most noteworthy feature of this unsolved case is that, before the body was even discovered, the killer dropped a bizarre handwritten note into a mailbox near Hodel’s downtown office. It provided an obviously bogus account of the crime in what reads like a pastiche of “hard-boiled” detective fiction. The text was as follows:
The equivalent character in Chandler’s 1939 short story “The Lady in the Lake,” a precursor to the novel, is given the name Lancelot Goodwin.