L.A. Noir

 Figure 1 The City of Los Angeles belonged to Raymond Chandler (figure 1) and his iconic fictional alter ego Philip Marlowe1. Like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, no other fictional detective has been so enmeshed with a city. Marlowe was active between 1939 and 1958, a period of rapid growth in Southern California. There many factors that contributed to the growth of the region, not least being the automobile. The 1930s saw the automobilization of not only the hospitality industry but also the home by way of the house trailer and the restaurant via the drive-in. In Southern California, the combination of a good climate, trailer camps, courts, and parks began to emerge as a major type of permanent housing to accommodate newly arriving defense workers. By 1940, the automobile culture was in full swing in California in anticipation of the way Americans would live in the post-war years.2 In the two decades of Marlowe’s activities, crime and corruption, which came with rapid commercial development, were interwoven with urban fabric.
 Figure 2 Philip Marlowe’s (figure 2) territory encompassed downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Westwood, and Santa Monica. Each of these locales has their own distinct ambience, visual style, and psychological climates, faithfully recorded by Chandler. For example, in Farewell My Lovely (1940) Chandler describes a house in Santa Monica stand-in Bay City,
It [Number 862 Aster Drive, Bay City] was close to the ocean and you could feel the ocean in the air…Aster Drive had a long smooth curve there and the houses on the inland side were just nice houses, but on the canyon side they were great silent estates, with twelve foot walls and wrought-iron gates and ornamental hedges…3

Chandler’s vision of Los Angeles was accurate with occasional affection and cruelty mixed together like a good stiff whiskey and soda. Chandler’s Marlowe knew the city’s every mood: hot and smoggy, air thick with carbon monoxide and faint odor of blood, or deceptively fresh with a touch of chaparral and corruption. A layer of decay and corruption lies just underneath the glitter and glamour of a beautiful location blighted by humanity, a beautiful night wrecked by a corpse.
 Figure 3 The “hard-boiled” detective of American mystery fiction first came to life in the 1920s and it was no surprise that his beat was the streets of California. It is not because the streets of California were meaner than New York or Chicago instead the journey of the private eye was a journey of truth. His was a lone quest for unraveling a person’s tortured truth (figure 3) and Southern California provided ample quarry. The allure of the glittering surfaces concealed tarnished surfaces offering cynical sympathy to those who were cheated out of their dream at the edge of the continent. Southern California was a paradox: the desert met the sea, sunshine prevailed most of the year, and “Southern California is the land of the ‘sun-down sea, where the sun suddenly plummets into the ocean, disappearing ‘like a lost and bloody cause.’”4 In this land of the “sun-down sea” immigrants from the East Coast and the Midwest were free from the constraints of the past and were able to reinvent themselves. David Smith writes, “However, this ‘new’ society was no more detached from a past that shaped its public form than were its denizens free to make themselves anew…the probing of relationships between the fixed individual and his forming society….”5
One recurring theme of the detective fiction genre is constant movement. Philip Marlowe is a man always on the move through the mean streets, cocktail bars, waterfronts, and mansions. He knows them all with a restlessness that mirrors the restlessness of the city. Chandler appropriates the Los Angeles basin in a consistently symbolic manner. The criminals committed their misdeeds in the flatlands and them move into the hills or the bluffs above the ocean. “Move up” is both literal and metaphoric.6 People live in walled fortresses above the city insulated from the crimes they committed below. They take on new identities and locations, purchased as form of immunity from the past. This type of movement is encouraged by the fluid lifestyle that was typical of Los Angeles in the thirties, forties, and fifties. It was Marlowe’s job to go into the hills, drag the perpetrator down into the flatlands, and make him pay for his crimes.
Like the city he wrote about, Chandler and his wife Cissy mirrored Los Angeles’ restless nature at the edge of the world. Throughout the thirties, the Chandlers moved numerous times: Silver Lake, Downtown, Hancock Park, Fairfax, Santa Monica, and the Palm Springs area. The urban nomads kept their possessions in storage lockers drawing on them as needed for whatever specific rental, which they abandoned after a few months.7 In general, Chandler did not have a high regard for Los Angeles. In a letter to Fellow Black Mask∗ writer George Harmon Cox dated October 17, 1939, he complains, “I’m sick of California and the kind of people it breeds. Of course I like La Jolla, but La Jolla is only a sort of escape from reality. It’s not typical…She [Cissy Chandler] agrees with that that the percentage of phonies in population is increasing…”8 Of La Jolla, in a letter to Cox on April 9 the same year, “If you come to the Coast to live, you should look at La Jolla before you decide where to live. I think it is a much better place than Laguna in every possible way. It is dear for a small town, but it is has perfect climate in both winter and summer, …”9
Raymond Chandler and his fictional alter ego's relationship with Los Angeles was complicated. On the one hand the city had eaten him up and kept him on the precipice of nothing. Yet on the other hand, without Los Angeles, both he and Marlowe were nothing. Without the City of Angels, Marlowe and Chandler would have disembodied ghosts, perhaps like the nameless, faceless spirits that wonder the streets of Tinsel Town in search of their big break. The city fired the writer’s imagination and he, in turn, did the same. Without the crime and corruption, the seedy hotels, the shakedowns, and payoffs, what would he have written about? How would have Philip Marlowe made a living? Like Chandler, Marlowe knew the raw underside of a city that could destroy people by giving them false hopes. Where else could Marlowe exist? Pain and bad behavior were his passion and obsession. Like the inhabitants, Marlowe heeded the Siren’s call to migrate from Santa Rosa, California to travel the mean streets. In Little Sister (1949) Marlowe declares, “I used to like this town…A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town…Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful.10
Raymond Chandler arrived in Los Angeles in 1912, coinciding with opening of the Mulholland Aqueduct. The aqueduct was the brainchild of William Mulholland and was designed to bring water from the Owens Valley River to Los Angeles. The project involved a highly intricate series of scandalous manipulations by a consortium of bankers, politicians, businessmen, and newspaper owners who swindled farmers in the Owens Valley out of their water rights and then through bribery and deceit had public funds voted for their scheme in order to profit on apparently worthless land in the San Fernando Valley. It took over six years to build the aqueduct which consisted of two hundred thirty-five miles of canals, conduits, flumes, tunnels, penstocks, tailraces, and siphons from its intake point in the town of Independence in the Owens Valley twelve miles away. The project completely ruined the valley by 1927 but created highly desirable irrigated land in the San Fernando Valley. The importance of water, as well as oil and real estate, are never far away from the iconic Marlowe.
 Figure 4 Oil (figure 4), like land and water are what built Los Angeles. Oil created the industrial infrastructure of Southern California beginning in the 1890s. By 1924, the Los Angeles Basin produced 230 millions barrels of oil and 300 billion cubic feet of natural gas.11 Land speculation created a transit system that produced communities spread out across the southland. Oil is what made the Sternwoods of Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep wealthy. Chandler writes, “On this lower level faint and far off I could just barely see some of the old wooden derricks of the oilfield from the Sternwoods had made their money…But little of it was still producing in groups of wells pumping five or six barrels a day…”12 This excerpt presents a clear example of Chandler’s moral geography. The oil field is a family secret, which Philip Marlowe must uncover in order to restore order to the landscape. It is a symbol of wealth and corruption. It is in the oil field that the central crime is hidden in the past and Marlowe must seek it out and bring it to the light of day. David Fine writes,
Crime in the southern California version is ordinarily an act carried out in the past and hidden behind a respectable façade in the present…Respectability comes with the large house in the hills. Barricaded behind high walls, Chandler’s criminals are insulated from the past…13

 Figure 5 Philip Marlowe’s adventures frequently brought him in contact with wealthy. They were sometimes members of the established elite and other times they were the nouveau riche who made their fortunes through very questionable means. Either way, Marlowe takes it in with equal doses cynicism and suspicion sometimes grudgingly admiring all the trappings of wealth but with a keen awareness of the difference between good taste and vulgarity.14 Raymond Chandler describes the fictional Sternwood manor in the opening pages of The Big Sleep (1939),
The main hallway of the Sternwood place was stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady tied to a tree…On the east side of the hall a free staircase, tile-paved, rose to a galley with a wrought-iron railing and another piece of stained-glass romance…15

The fictitious mansion was based on severable recognizable models, including Greystone Manor (figure 5). Sternwood Manor is confluence of gloom, stained glass, wrought iron, and the sinister association with orchid, a “…fleshy, fungoid, requiring a steamy artificial atmosphere in which to live.”16 In Chandler’s familiar view of Los Angeles, rich equals degenerate, poor equals honest.
 Figure 6 Raymond Chandler’s General Sternwood, the dying father of two dangerous daughters, is an oilman whose mansion is built on black gold and dubious business methods, like Edward Doheny. By 1925, Doheny had amassed a sufficient amount of capital to build Greystone Manor for his son and heir. Construction took more than two-and-half years at a cost of four million dollars. No so coincidentally, it was the sight of the most famous or infamous murder-suicide, which Chandler fictionalized in High Window (1942). The Sternwood Mansion combines elements of Greystone, Edward Doheny’s Senior’s mansion Chester Place (figure 6), the home of Joseph Dabney, President of Dabney Johnson, located at 420 South Lafayette near Hancock Park17 to create a perfect setting for murder and mischief.
Chandler’s familiarity with oil industry came from the job he held upon his return to California from Europe in 1917. Chandler found work in the state’s booming oil industry as an executive with Dabney-Johnson. The budding crime novelist was later sacked for drunkenness.18 Further, Chandler’s acquaintance with Greystone might have come about from a party he attended while still employed with Dabney-Johnson.19 From Greystone, the Dohenys, like Marlowe, were able to see the outline of the derricks against the sky. The oil refineries in Long Beach, El Segundo, and Wilmington made Los Angeles County the number one petroleum production center in the nation.20 The Port of Los Angeles, twenty-five miles south of Downtown, shipped about hundred million barrels of petroleum every year.21
 Figure 7 Hollywood is Marlowe’s home turf, his office is located in the Guaranty Building (figure 7) on Hollywood and Ivar, Musso and Frank’s Grill was nearby; Stanley Rose’s bookstore next door became Bennett’s Bookshop (a front for pornography in The Big Sleep). The latter was a case of art imitating life Rose was arrested for pornography. Hollywood began life as a motion picture colony in the Edendale district of Los Angeles. Early silent filmmakers were able to take advantage of a variety of natural scenery that was suitably adaptable for making movies. In 1911, the colony moved from the Elysian Park area to Hollywood. By 1920, the population grew to twenty thousand and two hundred thirty-five thousand in 1930.22 But even as the colony became more fleshed out, it already began to experience the taint of scandal and vice. The colony was populated by individuals deemed “…unfit to mingle with respectable citizens.”23 There was notorious Fatty Arbuckle case, the murder of William Desmond Taylor, and the murder (maybe) of Thomas Ince aboard William Randolph Hearst’s yacht. In forming the Motion Picture Producer’s Association, Will (“Deacon”) Hayes was retained to clean up the industry. His efforts resulted in the Hayes Code, which required morals clauses in performer’s contracts and private detectives were hired to closely examine the actor’s private lives.
Geographically, Hollywood extends north to south, from the summit of the Hollywood Hills to Beverly Boulevard and Hoover Street to Doheny Drive, east to west. It is a district made up of apartment buildings with high occupancy turnover rates attesting to the mobile nature of Los Angeles. Its population is engaged in the motion picture industry. Carey McWilliams divides this population into three strata: the two hundred or more that make in excess of seventy-five thousand dollars a year, the junior elite who make between twenty-five and fifty thousand a year, and the lesser elite, the “workers” defined as administrative staff, skilled and unskilled laborers, and craftsmen who make between ten thousand and fifteen thousand dollars a year.24 Below that are the hangers on such as the extras and hustlers who move about the streets looking for their break.
Horace McCoy, a contemporary of Raymond Chandler chronicles the tragedy of the hangers on in his book They Shoot Horses Don’t They (1935). McCoy tells the sad tale of Gloria Beatty, a “…half pretty girl capable of exciting the lotharios in West Texas but not good enough for the silver screen…”25 and Robert Syverten who desperate for a job as an errand boy for a director. The two enter a dance marathon on the pier in Santa Monica but their efforts are doomed by a series of events that force the cancellation of the marathon. Gloria, hates her life, with no prospects in life wants to die and ask Robert to shoot her. The book illustrates the cruelty of the Hollywood dream factory. Pretty girls are a dime a dozen. Hollywood has little use for “Cracker-type.”26 Gloria and Robert are like the Joads of The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Okies clinging an illusion that turns out to be a nightmare. These are the people that wonder the streets of Raymond Chandler’s Hollywood and make it the perfect setting for Philip Marlowe. It was a place where people like Paul Wharton∗ could continually run from their pasts and refashion a new identity for themselves. Beneath the glare of the fantasy lies a place that sucks the very soul out those who live and tosses the bodies out. The pier might have offered respite for Gloria and Robert, instead becomes an agent of their doom. The Santa Monica Pier also becomes the jumping off point of a variety of sordid activities.
 Figure 8 Santa Monica (figure 8), one of the oldest settlements in Southern California, is at the center of the Bay area, and served as a model for Chandler’s Bay City.27 It fulfills every fantasy a person could have about Los Angeles: five to six miles of waterfront, wide stretches of yellow sand, which combined with the year round temperate climate could accommodate tens of thousands of Angelinos on the weekends. The focal point is a rickety wooden pier, one a few still surviving to this day. The Santa Monica of Chandler’s era was the ocean front playground of Hollywood. Marion Davis maintained her residence and the downtown Jonathan Club operated a branch. It was the epitome of Southern California lifestyle as a suburban seaside; on Sundays, the middle classes filled the region.28 Nearby Venice was also a popular place with its boardwalk and arcade. Santa Monica was popular resort with its Ocean Park amusement district with roller coasters, skating rinks, and the carousel. The city boasted itself as “The Coney Island of the West.”29 In Farewell My Lovely, Chandler writes,
Outside the narrow street fumed, the sidewalks swarmed with fat stomachs. Across the street a bingo parlor was going full blast and beside it a couple of sailors with girls were coming of a photographer’s shop where they probably been have their photos taken riding on camels… After a while there was a faint smell of ocean. Not much, but as if they had kept this much just to remind people this had once been a clean open beach…30

But of course, in Chandler’s seaside playground corrupt police and dubious characters lay just beneath the surface.
Raymond Chandler did not have to look far to find criminal activity in Santa Monica. All he had to do was look of the coast and there he could find the gambling ships. The offshore gambling ships were a fixture in the Bay Area and provided the climax for Farewell My Lovely. Other than changing the names (to protect the not so innocent), Chandler did very little to disguise then. Chandler writes,
The Royal Crown seemed to ride as steady as a pier on its four hawsers. Its landing stage was lit up like a theater marquee. Then it all faded into remoteness and another, older, smaller boat began to sneak out of the night toward us. It was not much to look at. A converted seagoing freighter with scummed and rusted plates the superstructure cut down to the boat deck level, and above that two stumpy masts just high enough for a radio antenna…31

The ships were the idea of Tony Cornero, a racketeer who prospered during Prohibition as a rumrunner32, who was hoping to avoid the reform minded Fletcher Bowron. He realized that Santa Monica and Long Beach were ideal places to go into the gambling business. Refurbishing four ships as casinos: the Rex, Texas, Tango and Showboat, Cornero anchored them beyond the three-mile limit claiming his operation was legal.33 Cornero went as far as to advertise in the local papers claiming the best gambling establishments west of Monte Carlo.34 The flagship, the Rex hosted about three thousand customers on the hour. No one seemed to pay much attention until Earl Warren became Attorney General of California and raid the boats on August 2, 1939. A judge’s ruling finally closed the ships and Cornero went off to Las Vegas to run the Stardust Hotel.
To conclude, as a writer, Raymond Chandler created a world that was as real a world of his contemporaries, Horace McCoy and John Steinbeck. His nomadic life immersed him in the essence of metropolitan Los Angeles. Chandler’s Los Angeles reveals a catalog of places, that when taken individually, forms a symbolic map of the city: Hollywood, Santa Monica, the oil fields in Baldwin Hill, and Pasadena. Both the author and alter ego are mirrors of a city during a time of transition and growth.