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.