The Killers (1964)
"Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler's Imagined City," comprises photographs of all the ominous, forbidding locations in Los Angeles Chandler wrote about in his novels. These places – from Malibu Pier to the Hollywood Sign, from Union Station to the Beverly Hills Hotel, from MGM Studios to Musso and Frank's Grill – form the literary geography of his imagination.
Clive James wrote of Chandler's fascination with Los Angeles, "When he said that it had as much personality as a paper cup, he was saying what he liked about it. When he said that he could leave it without a pang, he was saying why he felt at home there."
But Chandler was also drawn to the Edward Hopper-like loneliness of the city: the separate existences that never, finally, merge. In these photographs, Catherine Corman has given us, as Jonathan Lethem writes in his preface, "a supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places...these streets and buildings we have erected in order to give order to our solitudes."
"Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler's Imagined City" by Catherine Corman, with a preface by Jonathan Lethem, is forthcoming from Charta Art Books in Fall 2009.
“Give me the money.”
The motor of the gray Plymouth throbbed under her voice and the rain pounded above it. The violet light at the top of Bullock’s green-tinged tower was far above us, serene and withdrawn from the dark, dripping city. Her black-gloved hand reached out and I put the bills in it. She bent over to count them under the dim light of the dash. A bag clicked open, clicked shut. She let a spent breath die on her lips. She leaned towards me.
“I’m leaving, copper. I’m on my way.”
At the opening of The Lady In The Lake, Raymond Chandler writes: “The Treloar Building was, and is, on Olive Street, near Sixth, on the west side. The sidewalk in front of it had been built of black and white rubber blocks. They were taking them up now to give to the government, and a hatless pale man with a face like a building superintendent was watching the work and looking as if it was breaking his heart.” Here’s Los Angeles playing the role of a Utopia—rubber sidewalks!—always on the verge of being rescinded, and melted back down in favor of guns or vehicles. If California’s place in American history is as a destination that is therefore also an ending, a dream-voyage’s foreclosure before tipping into the Pacific, Manifest Destiny become Manifest Distress, then Los Angeles is a bluff, a tenuous proposition, a place built so quickly that everyone’s nerves are still jangled from its sudden appearance and the obligation to act as though it actually exists. Notice Chandler’s first hesitation—the Treloar “was, and is,” on Olive—might his readers fear it had moved?
While we’re conducting this interrogation, who is that hatless pale man anyway, watching the work? He only has a face like a building superintendent, though of course there’s nothing in this remark that prevents him actually being one. More important, perhaps, is the man describing the man, the man obviously also watching, the Chandler-Marlowe presence that suffuses the scene in its omnipresent-unacknowledged, pale-shading-to-invisible way. What’s his stake in the Treloar and its rubber sidewalk? Hard to say, except that in Chandler the hardboiled style becomes above all a way of seeing, not so far from photography itself. Philip Marlowe’s ease of access across boundaries, his passage again and again into the scenes of love, strife and murder that fill Chandler’s books, reveal him as a kind of camera, or ghost. Making his elusive visitations, Marlowe becomes a presence whose movements, though momentarily subject to the holding actions of policemen or of human desire, are ultimately too lightly bound by these strictures to be more than briefly delayed. “Murder-a-day Marlowe” has always got another appointment to keep, another room or street to occupy in his insomniac catalogue of the false permanence of human arrangements. And, since this is Los Angeles, what he witnesses in the flash-bulb sunlight, the visionary, hallucinatory sunlight, is also the false permanence of the places these human lives have come to occupy, and the false indifference of those places to the human catastrophes enacted within their walls and borders. If architecture is fate, then it is Marlowe’s fate to enumerate the pensive dooms of Los Angeles, the fatal, gorgeous pretenses of glamour and ease, the bogus histories reenacted in the dumb, paste-and-spangles cocktail of style. Remove the dead bodies, and the living ones, as Catherine Corman has done in her own supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places, and the force of Chandler’s insight becomes even more terrifyingly urgent: these streets and buildings we have erected in order to give order to our solitudes, to keep them from being piled unbearably atop one another, they are actively trying to forget us. And what is a ghost, finally, but a kind of building superintendent? At least until the whole place is disassembled and converted into vehicles and guns.
The motor of the gray Plymouth throbbed under her voice and the rain pounded above it. The violet light at the top of Bullock’s green-tinged tower was far above us, serene and withdrawn from the dark, dripping city. Her black-gloved hand reached out and I put the bills in it. She bent over to count them under the dim light of the dash. A bag clicked open, clicked shut. She let a spent breath die on her lips. She leaned towards me.
“I’m leaving, copper. I’m on my way.”
At the opening of The Lady In The Lake, Raymond Chandler writes: “The Treloar Building was, and is, on Olive Street, near Sixth, on the west side. The sidewalk in front of it had been built of black and white rubber blocks. They were taking them up now to give to the government, and a hatless pale man with a face like a building superintendent was watching the work and looking as if it was breaking his heart.” Here’s Los Angeles playing the role of a Utopia—rubber sidewalks!—always on the verge of being rescinded, and melted back down in favor of guns or vehicles. If California’s place in American history is as a destination that is therefore also an ending, a dream-voyage’s foreclosure before tipping into the Pacific, Manifest Destiny become Manifest Distress, then Los Angeles is a bluff, a tenuous proposition, a place built so quickly that everyone’s nerves are still jangled from its sudden appearance and the obligation to act as though it actually exists. Notice Chandler’s first hesitation—the Treloar “was, and is,” on Olive—might his readers fear it had moved?
While we’re conducting this interrogation, who is that hatless pale man anyway, watching the work? He only has a face like a building superintendent, though of course there’s nothing in this remark that prevents him actually being one. More important, perhaps, is the man describing the man, the man obviously also watching, the Chandler-Marlowe presence that suffuses the scene in its omnipresent-unacknowledged, pale-shading-to-invisible way. What’s his stake in the Treloar and its rubber sidewalk? Hard to say, except that in Chandler the hardboiled style becomes above all a way of seeing, not so far from photography itself. Philip Marlowe’s ease of access across boundaries, his passage again and again into the scenes of love, strife and murder that fill Chandler’s books, reveal him as a kind of camera, or ghost. Making his elusive visitations, Marlowe becomes a presence whose movements, though momentarily subject to the holding actions of policemen or of human desire, are ultimately too lightly bound by these strictures to be more than briefly delayed. “Murder-a-day Marlowe” has always got another appointment to keep, another room or street to occupy in his insomniac catalogue of the false permanence of human arrangements. And, since this is Los Angeles, what he witnesses in the flash-bulb sunlight, the visionary, hallucinatory sunlight, is also the false permanence of the places these human lives have come to occupy, and the false indifference of those places to the human catastrophes enacted within their walls and borders. If architecture is fate, then it is Marlowe’s fate to enumerate the pensive dooms of Los Angeles, the fatal, gorgeous pretenses of glamour and ease, the bogus histories reenacted in the dumb, paste-and-spangles cocktail of style. Remove the dead bodies, and the living ones, as Catherine Corman has done in her own supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places, and the force of Chandler’s insight becomes even more terrifyingly urgent: these streets and buildings we have erected in order to give order to our solitudes, to keep them from being piled unbearably atop one another, they are actively trying to forget us. And what is a ghost, finally, but a kind of building superintendent? At least until the whole place is disassembled and converted into vehicles and guns.
—Jonathan Lethem
“We go west,” she said, “through the Beverly Hills and then father on.”
I let the clutch in and drifted around the corner to go south to Sunset. Dolores got one of her long brown cigarettes out.
“Did you bring a gun?” she asked.
I let the clutch in and drifted around the corner to go south to Sunset. Dolores got one of her long brown cigarettes out.
“Did you bring a gun?” she asked.
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