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 3 of 3
As the bus moves through traffic, Chandler's old haunts come to life – the county morgues and police drunk tanks, the aging hotels – all the places where he staged his fictional crime scenes. At each stop, the tour is augmented by video clips, oral history lessons, and Chandler readings.
"An old man sat inside [an open grilled elevator], slack jawed and watery-eyed on a piece of folded burlap on top of a wooden stool," says Kelly Kuvo, Schave's tour assistant, reading from "The High Window." "He looked as if he had been sitting there since the Civil War and had come out of that badly."
By tour's end, the once Doberman-focused patrons are as docile as basset hounds and, with some exceptions, thrilled with the trip. "The tour did a fabulous job of tying the events of Chandler's life into the material that subsequently appeared in his novels," says Jerry Joseph, who took his wife on the tour for her birthday.
Schoolteacher Steve Oster has passed places like the Mayfair Hotel hundreds of times without knowing that Chandler lived there. "I was struck by the number of diverse locales, from glamorous Hollywood homes to skid row, that were used in Chandler's books and movies," he says.
Michael Beckelhimer, a documentary filmmaker, enjoys Chandler's noir L.A. He's "created this whole vision of a black-and-white, rainy city," he says. "I mean you really have to draw the blinds to read his books or watch his movies."
It's clear from the tour how much L.A. has – and hasn't – changed in the 50 years since Chandler's death. The riders are fascinated with the layers of Chandler-era L.A. still evident under the smudge of history: the old hotel signs, the art deco lobbies with period features and furnishings. As the fading dusk steals color and form from the L.A. skyline, the echoes of Chandler's past are put to rest, but the spirit of Marlowe lives on in his modern counterparts.
"The detective in this kind of story must be ... the hero, he is everything ..." writes Chandler, finishing his "mean streets" quote in "The Simple Art of Murder." "The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth."
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