Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles (Paperback)

by Alain Silver (Editor), Elizabeth Ward (Editor) "Los Angeles considers itself among the foremost cities in the world..." (more)
Key Phrases: big sleep, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, The Little Sister (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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.

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

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Overlook TP (March 2, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879513519
• ISBN-13: 978-0879513511
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #336,163 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hardboiled, and hard to put down!, November 28, 2000

By	Tara OShea "Tara O'Shea" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, July 20, 2004

By	Koogan (Athens, GA USA) - See all my reviews

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better than a guidebook,, October 25, 2005

By	Rhodes (Hollywood, CA) - See all my reviews

although it would be hard to classify this book exactly. The crisp, stark and sometimes impressionistic images are well suited to the tone of Chandler's prose. At first glance, it seems to be just a photo book of office buildings and tract homes from the Chandler era. But shots like the eucalyptus leaves melting over a street lamp or the pouty young woman in the swimming pool are striking visual parallels to Chandler writing about "crawling lava" or the "ashes of love." Plus the authors write perceptively about Chandler's relationship to the City of Angels.