Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles

I recently have been engaged in a rereading of the fiction of Raymond Chandler and I decided to read in addition a few books to enhance my enjoyment, including a biography and other works about Chandler. Because Philip Marlowe's world is evoked in such great specificity, I thought it would be nice to look at this photographic exploration of Marlowe's Los Angeles. I have never been to Los Angeles and while I am, like most Americans, familiar with the many looks of Los Angeles because of the film and television industry, I don't have a very precise understanding of how the city is laid out. I know that today East Los Angeles is Hispanic and West Hollywood is a gay area, but too many of the area names are simply that. The same holds true for many of the surrounding suburbs. For instance, I have a very imprecise idea of Santa Barbara. I have no idea if it is stylish or downtrodden or even what it looks like. If set down in L.A. I wouldn't have the foggiest idea of what direction to go to get to U.C.L.A. or the Hollywood Bowl (or for that matter Hollywood) or Dodger Stadium or, really, anything.I should add that the book's title is a bit of a misnomer. Though there is some attention to relate L.A. to Raymond Chandler, what it really tries to do is relate it to Chandler's alter ego Philip Marlowe. The book's excerpts refer to Marlowe's adventures. It is concerned to illuminate where the scenes from the Marlowe stories are set. Its focus, in other words, is literary and not biographical. Locales are selected for their reference to Marlowe and not to Chandler, though there are a couple of exceptions.This book helps a great deal in many ways in gaining a better understanding of what specific buildings and even areas look like. My lone complaint is that it makes no attempt whatsoever to show how the various bits connect up. In that regard it is poorly arranged. If you are a native of Los Angeles or know it well, perhaps this would not be an issue, but while I get the look of certain buildings, I don't understand the city. I think the value of the book would have been tremendously enhanced if the photos and excerpts had been arranged more sectionally. A map would have helped, perhaps showing approximately where each place that is referred to is located. I have, for instance, loved the use of the Bradbury Building in various noir productions (though thinking of the Bradbury this week is painful because of ABC's absurd cancellation of PUSHING DAISIES, currently the best show on television, which has used the Bradbury for several locations shots, it standing in for the apartment building where Ned and Chuck and Olive all live) from the Golden Age of Noir (if "noir" is not incompatible with such a vivid color) to the noirish BLADE RUNNER. But I still haven't a clue where the Bradbury stands. Again, if Ward and Silver had included a map and coordinated the excerpts with that map, this would have been a far more useful book than it is.Still, that one rather major complaint aside, this was a fun book. The selections from Chandler were made judiciously and the photos definitely enhance the enjoyment of the novels and stories. For instance, I read this book immediately after rereading THE BIG SLEEP, FAREWELL MY LOVELY, and THE HIGH WINDOW, but before rereading THE LADY IN THE LAKE. Because of the photos of Puma Lake Dam I had a much better visual grasp of the book's ending than I would have otherwise. And looking back at the other novels I had a better idea of what the Sternwood mansion looked like in THE BIG SLEEP.This is a fun, pleasant book that suffers from the one organizational weakness I mentioned earlier. But if you are a fan of Chandler and like me unfamiliar with L.A. and would like a better grasp of Philip Marlowe's world, I definitely recommend this.

If you like Chandler's writing and are fascinated by the long-lost LA of the thirties and forties, this book is for you. There are numerous quotes from some of Chandler's best work, paired with black-and-white shots of many representative locations that were still around in the '70s and '80s. So you get an idea of how the place used to be, and a sense of what might still be available if you poked around enough. It's an exposition of both Chandler's LA and Marlowe's, and it was hard for me to put down.Sure, these aren't period photographs, and yes, it's too bad that the authors didn't include a map of the locations they chose. And the bibliography is a bit uneven. And they didn't touch the stories from Killer in the Rain. All told, there are enough loose ends to provide the inspiration for another book. But I'm glad we've got this one.

the pictures were good, and with help from Google earth it was a good read

The book is well-researched and has numerous photographs of a now forgotten pre-war Los Angeles that set the backgrounds for Raymond Chandler's detective stories. The stories are perhaps more interesting than the mapping of the settings for them, but nevertheless this edition is of interest to those seeking to picture what the classic Los Angeles of fabled lore was actually like at the time of Chandler's writing. It was portrayed in the light of a "noir city" rife with corruption and opportunity for crime. The latter has long fascinated the reader of fiction or the classic noir-style films made from some of Chandler's stories. For cross referencing reality to fiction, nothing beats a volume like this with its sense of place and investigative detail of the places in the world that Chandler lived in.

Great book! Full of pictures for all the hard-boiled Chandler's fans!!

I am not completely sure which pictures in the book show the locations as they looked in Chandler's time and which ones show them as they appear today. I know from my own hometown that it is possible to completely erase the past so that nothing looks even close to the way it was.

Wonderful history. A look back at L.A. very enjoyable

Is there a "Raymond Changler's Los Angeles"? Probably not. Certainly you can't find it in this book. What you have are a series of quotes from the book and possible locations (some specific ones) with photos of the period suggesting what the site may have looked like when he was living there. There are three problems with this format: 1) there is no map to the specific sites so it cannot be used as a touring guide. 2) The quotes are often very general and do not depict any particular location, so the designated location is arbitrary. 3) The images are not generaly good and useless for identifying the current location. So this is a book of poor quality images intended to convey the "feeling of" a noir LA of the 30s-40s from images in the 1980s? Useful only as a collection of one Chandler fan's picture of Chandler's LA for other fans who don't live close enough to see for themselves.

I was amazed to discover that there are more books ABOUT Raymond Chandler than there are BY the man! I haven't read them all, but this one kept me amused and entertained with its mixture of reader-friendly text and style along with umpteen photographs. It even inspired me to make a book about my own town! After all, nowhere is it written that you have to write the novel first. As the earlier reviewer wrote, this book adds to the enjoyment of the seven Marlowe novels. How much enjoyment can you handle? Totally recommended.

As a Londoner I love LA - A city whose resonance belies its youth. This book helps capture some of those associations. Fun to read and will inform my hopefully soon next visit.

An excellent companion to Chandlers detective fiction.