A gumshoe's tour of Los Angeles
Raymond Chandler buffs take a bus ride through L.A., visiting the dark city of the late author's crime novels.
from the May 22, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
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.
"Chandler is an evangelist for the transformative power of literature ... just the prose itself will get under your skin and not leave you alone," says David Kipen, director of literature for the National Endowment for the Arts. He suggests that Chandler may have more readers today than Nobel Prize winner Faulkner and has "probably turned more readers into writers than Faulkner ever did."
One of his most ardent devotees is Richard Schaves, a boyish man with thick brown hair who is holding a mike at the front of the bus. Mr. Schaves created the crime tour, called "In a Lonely Place: Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles." He grew up in the city, devouring all of Chandler's books as a teenager. Schaves is also an alumnus of two of Chandler's favorite L.A. milieus – the public school system and the city's seedy underworld (courtesy of a racketeering uncle and grandfather).
Yet all this immersion in Marlowe's pistol-whipped world might have just remained a personal passion for Schaves if it hadn't been for his wife. Several years ago, Kim Cooper began deconstructing what is considered a seminal year in Los Angeles history, 1947. Her daily blogs about the lurid crimes of that year – including the infamous Black Dahlia murder, still unsolved – led to a series of crime-scene bus tours. Schaves realized that 1947 came in the middle of Chandler's most prolific decade of writing: 1943-53.
"It was only a matter of time until a Chandler tour became indispensable to understanding this key decade in L.A. history," says Schaves.
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