Product Description

Reissued for the 50th anniversary of the film of Chandler's novel, The Big Sleep, this evocative and elegant book juxtaposes excerpts of Chandler's tough, cynical prose with black-and-white photographs of the city he described as "no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness." 100 photos.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66949 in Books
• Published on: 1989-03-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

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.

Customer Reviews

Hardboiled, and hard to put down!
A goldmine for any fan of Chandler's Marlowe novels and short stories, I couldn't put this book down. It finally gave context to the vistas I had only been able to imagine previously, and I'll never be able to pick up any hard boiled detective story set in Los Angeles without flashing on the images painstakingly chosen to be included in this volume by Ward and Silver. An invaluable asset to any Chandler and noir fan.

Disappointing
I was very disappointed with this book. From the description, I expected photographs from the 1930s and 40s, providing a historic view of Los Angeles from the period of many of Chandler?s novels. Instead, the photographs, which are usually dark and sometimes fuzzy, were taken during the 70s and early 80s. In some cases, the table of contents doesn?t even reference the correct page numbers. I wouldn?t recommend this one. You'd be better off renting "The Big Sleep" DVD.

A pleasant exploration of Philip Marlowe's world
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.