A gumshoe's tour of Los Angeles

The engine of the giant tour bus idles loudly, and its plush-blue interior vibrates like a clothes washer stuck on "agitate." About 50 riders – age 30-something to 70-something – occupy high-back seats, staring forward like a kennel of Dobermans eyeing a mailman's calves. A frumpy matron makes her way down the carpeted aisle and tries to break the air of restlessness with an offhand remark.

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean," she says, speaking to no one in particular.

It is a description of 1940s Los Angeles from one of its greatest writers – Raymond Chandler – straight out of her dog-eared copy of "The Simple Art of Murder," protruding from her equally dog-eared purse.

All who hear her know the line. The bus is full of mystery-loving, novel-toting, passage-quoting noir junkies. Each has plunked down $55 to be told stuff about the genre's biggest icon, and the city's preeminent literary chronicler.

In nearly three dozen short stories and seven novels – all seven made into movies – Chandler half-chronicled and half-invented a black-and-white dreamscape of the dark side of Los Angeles in the 1930s and '40s. And he immortalized a hard-boiled detective, Philip Marlowe, to stalk the city's physical and moral sprawl to solve murders and seek larger truths.

Now, 70 years later, this bus load of gum-shoe wannabes seems taken with the idea of trying to uncover – or recover – whatever is left of Chandler's mean streets. Streets lined with neon-lit, art deco, and Gothic buildings. Neighborhoods filled with, as only Chandler could put it, "crooks on the lam," "haggard landladies," and "people who look like nothing in particular and know it."

***

"How about this," says a voice from across the bus aisle. "It was one of those hot, dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch."

It is another Chandler line being quoted from memory – this time from his novel "Red Wind." The man finishes: "On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks ... Anything can happen."

And so it goes for an afternoon: dueling quotations, formal readings, and visits to real locales that are themselves amalgams of the real and imagined – places augmented or diminished by Chandler to fit the needs of his stories, novels, and screenplays: the Bullocks Wilshire department store, where Marlowe meets Agnes Lozelle on a cold, rainy night in "The Big Sleep;" the Solana Apartments in Hollywood, said to be the model for where Velma shoots Moose Malloy in "Farewell, My Lovely."

The Saturday crime tour has a lofty goal: to become a rolling homage to both the author and the city that he loved, then hated, and immortalized in his writings.

Chandler's own route to creating a famous fictionalized private dick was circuitous. Born in Chicago in 1888, he tried journalism as a young man, worked several odd jobs including stringing tennis rackets and picking fruit, became a platoon leader in World War I, and then wound up as an executive with an L.A.-based oil company. At age 45, he started teaching himself to write pulp fiction, mimicking such writers as Earl Stanley Gardner for mystery magazines. His first novel, "The Big Sleep," was published in 1939. William Faulkner wrote the screenplay for the movie version of the book in 1945, and Chandler was nominated for an Oscar for his own screenplay for Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity."

Chandler's classification as a mystery writer – and only an L.A. mystery writer at that – undoubtedly diminished his place in the world of serious literature. But some think that's unfair.

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