Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles
Category: Books,Literature & Fiction,History & Criticism
Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles Details
Amazon.com Review Elizabeth Ward and Alain Silver know their way around the City of Angels, its buildings and boulevards, its alleyways and environs, as well as Philip Marlowe. So get in your Oldsmobile and put the top down for this literary tour of a Lala Land that partly no longer exists and sometimes never was--for Raymond Chandler's locales, as the authors note, are "a pastiche of the real and the imagined." Mostly what we have here is the visual equivalent. Silver Lake became the less glamorous Gray Lake in the novelist's cynical prose; the fabled Bradbury Building (seen in the 1969 film Marlowe) became the Belfont. City hall is for real, of course, but nothing is quite what it seems. Read more About the Author Alain Silver and James Ursini are the authors of Film Noir: The Encyclopedia. Alain Silver is also the author of The Samurai Film, and co-author of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles (all available from Overlook).Elizabeth M. Ward, M.S, R.D., is a freelance writer and nutrition consultant in the Boston area. She is the author or co-author of Healthy Foods, Healthy Kids; Pregnancy Nutrition: Good Health for You and Your Baby, and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Feeding Your Baby and Toddler. Ward writes for several publications, including Prevention, Men’s Fitness, Fit Pregnancy, American Baby, Boston Globe, Parents, and Parenting. Read more
Reviews
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.
