A view of Bunker Hill from nearby Pershing Square, 1900.
Everyone has their own California dream—maybe sunshine and leisure, maybe Hollywood fame and wealth. But when the dream crashes, California can be desolate place. That's what Raymond Chandler saw in Los Angeles during the 1930's and 1940's, and that's what he often depicted through the eyes of his detective hero, Philip Marlowe.
Chandler's works often examined how the corruption, the decay, and the danger at the center of urban life threatened the California dream. In the 1942 novel The High Window, he symbolized these ideas in images of the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles:
Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets. They are all rooming houses now, there parquetry floors are scratched and worn through the once glossy finish and the wide sweeping staircases are dark with time and with cheap varnish laid on over generations of dirt. . . .
Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hands that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them.
Raymond Chandler used this distinctive, edgy style in classic portraits of noir Los Angeles like The Big Sleep, the novel that established Philip Marlowe the epitome of the wise-cracking, hard-boiled, gumshoe with a taste for books and a respect for chivalry.
From Edgar Allen Poe right through Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, the detective yarn was often more of a puzzle than a fully-imagined story. Raymond Chandler was among those who changed all that.
In his 1944 essay, "The Simple Art of Murder," Chandler criticizes the stereotype of the cerebral detective in favor of a different sort of character.
He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.
Most of Raymond Chandler's novels and stories fit just this description, especially those that involve his most famous character, Los Angeles gumshoe Philip Marlowe.
"Santa Ana Winds Fuel California Wildfires". NASA's MODIS Rapid Response Team, October 13, 2008.Larger.
Hot, dry mountain winds blow in many regions of the world, but there's always been something especially sinister about the Santa Ana winds of southern California.
In his 1938 short story "Red Wind," mystery writer Raymond Chandler captured perfectly the edgy, ominous feeling evoked by the Santa Anas, contrasting the raw emotional energy of wind-driven animus with the innocent hopefulness that Chandler finds in the most unlikely of settings, a Los Angeles cocktail lounge.
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Any thing can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
I was getting one in a flossy new place across the street from the apartment house where I lived. It had been open about a week and it wasn't doing any business. The kid behind the bar was in his early twenties and looked as if he had never had a drink in his life.
A graduate of an English public school and a former oil executive, novelist Raymond Chandler was seemingly an unlikely pioneer of California noir fiction. But books like The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye have become masterpieces of the hard-boiled detective fiction that Chandler helped to create.
From Edgar Allen Poe right through Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, the detective yarn was often more of a puzzle than a fully-imagined story. Raymond Chandler was among those who changed all that.
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