The mean streets tour: keeping Raymond Chandler’s LA alive
I wish I were in Los Angeles. For if I were, I would surely take the Raymond Chandler tour I just read about .
I’m sure LA has changed much from Raymond Chandler’s day, as I’m sure the city has also changed from my frequent visits there in the early 1970s, but a clever tour guide is trying to preserve Chandler’s LA attmosphere (and make a buck at the same time).
I read that an interviewer once questioned Chandler about some of the none-too-faithful film adaptations of his books, asking “Are you concerned about what filmmakers have done to your books?”
Chandler pointed to his books on a bookcase behind him and replied, “They haven’t done anything to my books. They’re right here.”
The LA tour might be fun and interesting, but we will always find Chandler’s LA in his great books.
To read about Chandler and how he has been a great influence on crime novels and films, you can read my On Crime & Thrillers column
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I wonder if they’ll ever have a Charles Bukowski tour. Between the two you could really have a sense of Los Angeles of the past.
By the way, LA isn’t the only city with literary tours. St. Petersburg used to have a Raskolnikov tour, where you could count the number of steps to the pawnbroker. You could even see the closet where got the ax.
There is an interesting, fairly recent Chandler book — “The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved,” in which the author, Judith Freeman, seeks out every one of the nearly three dozen addresses the couple lived at in their 30-year marriage. By conducting other research and using inventive techniques she imagines what their life could have been like. It has a few questionable assertions, but on the whole is intriguing.