—The Big Sleep
The swell is as gentle as an old lady singing hymns.
—The Long Goodbye
In the cove the waves don’t break, they slide in politely, like floor walkers.
—Playback
In that mood the city itself has its own kind of beauty, though the imagery is invariably man-made: “The lights of the city were a vast golden carpet, stitched with brilliant splashes of red and green and blue and purple” (“Pick-Up on Noon Street”) … “The lights of Hollywood and L.A. winked at him. Searchlight beams probed the cloudless sky as if searching for bombing planes” (“The King in Yellow”) … “the stars were as bright and artificial as stars of chromium on a sky of black velvet” (Farewell, My Lovely) … “a slanting grey rain like a swung curtain of crystal beads” (The Big Sleep) … “The light hit pencils of rain and made silver wires of them” (“The Curtain”) …
The valley moonlight was so sharp that the black shadows looked as though they had been cut with an engraving tool … ten thousand lighted windows and the stars hanging down over them politely, not getting too close.
—The High Window
The Beverly Hills Hotel was built in 1912 and immediately proved to be a magnet for the film community. Especially popular was the Polo Lounge, the pool and the private bungalows for rent. In the 1940s it was repainted in pink and green and acquired the nickname “the Pink Palace.” Photofest (illustrations credit 5.11)
There was loneliness and the smell of kelp and the smell of wild sage from the hills. A yellow window hung here and there, all by itself, like the last orange.
—Farewell, My Lovely
Spring rustling in the air like a paper bag blowing along a concrete sidewalk.
—Farewell, My Lovely
We curved through the bright mile or two of the Sunset Strip past the antique shops with famous screen names on them, past the windows full of point lace and ancient pewter, past the gleaming new nightclubs with famous chefs and equally famous gambling rooms, run by polished graduates of the Purple Gang, past the Georgian Colonial vogue, now old hat, past the handsome modernistic buildings in which the Hollywood flesh-peddlers never stop talking money, past a drive-in lunch which somehow didn’t belong, even though the girls wore white silk blouses and drum majorettes’ shakos and nothing below the hips but glazed Hessian boots. Past all this and down a wide smooth curve to the bridle path of Beverly Hills and lights to the south, all colors of the spectrum and crystal clear in an evening without fog, past the shadowed mansions up on the hills to the north, past Beverly Hills altogether and up into the twisting foothill boulevard and the sudden cool dusk and the drift of wind from the sea.
—Farewell, My Lovely
“Beverly Hills was such a nice place before the Phoenicians took it over. Now it’s just a setting for an enormous confidence racket.”
As time—and Marlowe—go by, another incidental dimension emerges in Chandler’s panorama of the city. Not only is it growing before our eyes but we are made aware of proximity. The bad and the beautiful exist literally cheek by jowl. Two blocks from obscene wealth is abject poverty. The dreams of Hollywood coexist happily with the worst urban nightmares … and nobody seems to notice or care too much.
1955. The 146-foot Richfield Building. “The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights.… There’s a boy who really made something out of nothing” (The Little Sister). (illustrations credit 5.12)
Even Nature is not to be trusted. It’s always lying in wait for you …
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those 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 husband’s necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
—“Red Wind”
In Farewell, My Lovely the poetry is still present but it soon begins to sour.
They went through the silent streets, past blurred houses, blurred trees, the blurred shine of street lights. There were neon signs behind thick curtains of mist. There was no sky.
—“Pick-Up on Noon Street”
The colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble. There’s a boy who really made something out of nothing.
—The Little Sister
Bunker Hill. The Victorian-style houses are deceptive. By the 1940s this once exclusive district had seen its former grandeur transformed into rooming houses. “Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city” (The High Window). (illustrations credit 5.13)
The city was changing before Chandler’s eyes, and the details become clearer with the passing years.
In “The King in Yellow” (1938):
Court Street was old town, wop town, crook town, arty town. It lay across the top of Bunker Hill and you could find anything there from down-at-the-heels ex–Greenwich Villagers to crooks on the lam, from ladies of anybody’s evening to County Relief clients brawling with haggard landladies in grand old houses with scrolled porches, parquetry floors, and immense sweeping banisters of white oak, mahogany and Circassian walnut.
By The High Window (1942) the decay has become terminal:
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, their 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. In the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles.
In and around the old houses there are flyblown restaurants and Italian fruit-stands and cheap apartment houses and little candy stores where you can buy even nastier things than their candy. And there are ratty hotels where nobody except people named Smith and Jones sign the register and where the night clerk is half watchdog and half pander.
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 hand 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.
Once in a while even men that actually go to work come out. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them.
The sadness for Chandler/Marlowe is how fast this has all happened to what is, by any definition, a “new” city …
I could see the Hotel Tremaine’s sign over a narrow door between two store fronts, both empty—an old two-story walk-up. Its woodwork would smell of kerosene, its shades would be cracked, its curtains would be a sleazy cotton lace and its bedsprings would stick in your back. I knew all about places like the Hotel Tremaine. I had slept in them, staked out in them, fought with bitter, scrawny landladies in them, got shot at in them, and might yet get carried out of one of them to the morgue wagon. They are flops where you find the cheap ones, the sniffers and pin-jabbers, the gowed‑up runts who shoot you before you can say hello.
—“Mandarin’s Jade”
In The Little Sister (1948) there was the Van Nuys Hotel:
The memories of old cigars clung to its lobby like the dirty gilt on its ceiling … The corridor had a smell of old carpet and furniture oil and the drab anonymity of
a thousand shabby lives.
Admittedly, twelve years before there had already been “blocks where silent men sat on shaky front porches and blocks where noisy young toughs of both colors snarled and wisecracked at one another in front of cheap restaurants and drugstores and beer parlors full of slot machines.” And dives where “they look as if they only existed after dark, like ghouls. The people are dissipated without grace, sinful without irony” (“Blackmailers Don’t Shoot”).
The image of old people on decaying porches had stayed with him from his Nebraska days. It crops up again in The Little Sister. There they sit on their “wood and cane rockers … held together with wire and the moisture of the beach air.”
The physical changes Chandler chronicled merely reflected the sociological ebb and flow, which were happening faster in Los Angeles than elsewhere in America. As more and more people poured in and the city became full to overflowing, the rich moved to less populated areas. The poor took over the vacated neighborhoods, changing the character of those environments overnight.
At the beginning of Farewell, My Lovely Marlowe refers to “one of those blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all negro.” Had Chandler lived, he would have seen a series of succeeding waves of which the Negro was simply the first. As many of them became “upwardly mobile,” they were being pushed in turn by the New Poor from Asia and Latin America. All Chandler saw was the way relatively new developments were turned into instant slums, as the “white trash” areas turned black.
Society was volatile and social values in flux. In the same book Moose Malloy, looking for his onetime girlfriend, Velma, comes to the bar where she used to work. But Moose has been in prison for the last eight years and the bar is now a “dinge joint.” There is a little difference of opinion, which leads to Moose killing or incapacitating three of the inhabitants. When questioned by the cops about what happened, Marlowe—who had been Moose’s reluctant companion on the visit in question—answers ironically:
“Well, all he did was kill a negro … I guess that’s only a misdemeanor.”
By Farewell, My Lovely (1940) a spray-painted veneer is in place to hide all that, and in The Little Sister (1948) it’s dried to a hard shine:
“We crossed La Cienega and went into the curve of the Strip. The Dancers was a blaze of light. The terrace was packed. The parking lot was like ants on a piece of overripe fruit.
The art deco Sunset Tower on Sunset Boulevard mentioned in The Big Sleep. (illustrations credit 5.14)
“… We’ve got the big money, the sharp shooters, the percentage workers, the fast-dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit—and Cleveland. We’ve got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the Lesbian dress designers, the riffraff of a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.
Out in the fancy suburbs dear old Dad is reading the sports page in front of a picture window, with his shoes off, thinking he is high class because he has a three-car garage. Mom is in front of her princess dresser trying to paint the suitcases out from under her eyes. And Junior is clamped onto the telephone calling up a succession of high school girls that talk pigeon English and carry contraceptives in their make‑up kit.”
“It is the same in all big cities, amigo.”
Later in the same story Marlowe takes another drive in what has become a numb commute for so many of his fellow citizens …
I drove east on Sunset but I didn’t go home. At La Brea I turned north and swung over to Highland, out over Cahuenga Pass and down on to Ventura Boulevard, past Studio City and Sherman Oaks and Encino. There was nothing lonely about the trip. There never is on that road. Fast boys in stripped-down Fords shot in and out of the traffic streams, missing fenders by a sixteenth of an inch, but somehow always missing them. Tired men in dusty coupés and sedans winced and tightened their grip on the wheel and ploughed on north and west towards home and dinner, an evening with the sports page, the blatting of the radio, the whining of their spoiled children and the gabble of their silly wives. I drove on past the gaudy neons and the false fronts behind them, the sleazy hamburger joints that look like palaces under the colors. The circular drive-ins as gay as circuses with the chipper hard-eyed carhops, the brilliant counters, and the sweaty greasy kitchens that would have poisoned a toad. Great double trucks rumbled down over Sepulveda from Wilmington and San Pedro and crossed towards the Ridge Route, starting up in low-low from the traffic lights with a growl of lions in the zoo.
Landscape and locations become as real as characters.
The rot that Chandler detects is not confined to Los Angeles. As Marlowe and his clones go about their business we get to see that smaller neighboring communities are equally infected.
There’s Bay City—his pseudonym for Santa Monica, where Chandler and Cissy lived for five years (“Law is where you buy it in this town”—Farewell, My Lovely).
“Bay City [Santa Monica] was a very nice place. People lived there and thought so … the nice blue bay and the cliffs … and the quiet streets of houses” (The Lady in the Lake). Marlowe didn’t agree: “All I know about Bay City is that every time I go there I have to buy a new head” (The Little Sister). (illustrations credit 5.15)
Bay City was a very nice place. People lived there and thought so … the nice blue bay and the cliffs and the yacht harbor and the quiet streets of houses, old houses brooding under old trees and new houses with sharp green lawns and wire fences and staked saplings set into the parkway in front of them.
—The Lady in the Lake
But appearances were often deceptive. Literally on the other side of the tracks:
The Mexican and Negro slums stretched out on the dismal flats south of the old interurban tracks. Nor of the waterfront dives along the flat shore south of the cliffs, the sweaty little dance halls on the pike, the marijuana joints, the narrow fox faces watching over the tops of newspapers in far too quiet hotel lobbies, nor the pickpockets and grifters and con men and drunk rollers and pimps and queens on the board walk.
—The Lady in the Lake
And on the Promenade:
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 out of a photographer’s shop … The voice of the hot dog merchant split the dusk like an axe … there was a faint smell of ocean. Not very much, but as if they had kept this much just to remind people this had once been a clean open beach where the waves came in and creamed and the wind blew and you could smell something besides the hot fat and cold sweat … beyond the smell of hot fat and popcorn and the shrill children and the barkers in the peepshows.
—Farewell, My Lovely
Later Chandler would remark that “a real clinical study of such a town would be fascinating reading.”
As early as 1939 Chandler had seen the writing on the wall for the city and didn’t like what he read one little bit. In a letter to fellow thriller writer George Harmon Coxe (October 17) he prophesied:
No doubt in years, or centuries to come, this will be the center of civilization, if there is any left, but the melting-pot stage bores me horribly. I like people with manners, grace, some social intuition, an education slightly above the Reader’s Digest fan, people whose pride of living does not express itself in their kitchen gadgets and their automobiles … I like a conservative atmosphere, a sense of the past. I like everything that Americans of past generations used to go and look for in Europe, but at the same time I don’t want to be bound by the rules.
For a while he and Cissy found refuge in La Jolla, a hundred miles south.
It has that intangible air of good breeding, which one imagines may still exist in New England, but which certainly does not exist any more in or around Los Angeles.
It had, he said,
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the finest coastline of the Pacific side of the country, no billboards or concessions or beachfront shacks, an air of cool decency and good manners that is almost startling in California. One may like a free and easy neighborhood where they smash the empty bottles on the sidewalk. But in practice it’s very comfortable.
Chandler’s house at 6005 Camino de la Costa, La Jolla, California. “I like La Jolla, but La Jolla is only a sort of escape from reality … No doubt in years, or centuries to come, this will be the center of civilization, if there is any left.” The Chandlers lived, left and returned several times in the itinerant 1940s and ’50s. (illustrations credit 5.16)
“Now it is humid, hot and sticky, and when the smog comes down into the bowl between the mountains … it is damn near intolerable” (The Long Goodbye). Photofest (illustrations credit 5.17)
But—as he admits to Coxe—
La Jolla is only a sort of escape from reality. It’s not typical.
It would be an escape for the Chandlers for several years to come, and somehow it made the gritty reality of L.A. harder to take. The language becomes increasingly bitter:
I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long.