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Gentle reader,

The Raymond Chandler Estate has again tapped a contemporary writer to pen an authorized Philip Marlowe novel. This time, it’s Denise Mina, prolific author of mysteries set in her native Scotland. The Second Murderer: A Philip Marlowe Novel was released this week. We’ve read it. Like most corporate art, it has some charm, and it has problems.

We asked the Blue Willow AI engine to illustrate the clammiest clam in the book.

Raymond Chandler was a writer before he came to Los Angeles, but a failed one. He lacked the independent income to be a poet or critic, and the professional drive to succeed as a journalist. So he was a cork, floating through life with the irritating awareness that but for an accident of birth, he could have been an artist. Like many other gifted and sensitive people, he drifted into business, where his talent for managing intelligent women served the Dabney Oil Syndicate well.

People were interesting. Business was interesting. Crime was interesting. Los Angeles was interesting. He observed everything. And when he was fired early in the Depression and cast loose to reinvent himself, a middle aged man with a sick wife and time at last to rest, he saw suddenly a path to an artist’s life that drew on the rich material he’d been collecting all along.

“Twenty-five minutes brought us to the Bryson Tower, a white stucco palace with fretted lanterns in the forecourt and tall date palms.” - The Lady in the Lake

Raymond Chandler and his detective Philip Marlowe are at their core reflections of their city. The mystery stories, the oddball characters, the moody locations, the shortcuts, the landscape and the light, the motivations and alliances—those are real, and you feel their truth, even if you’ve never set foot in Los Angeles, even if you were born in the 21st century.

Denise Mina has read her Chandler, and done a bit of research into old L.A.. The book begins with a fictionalization of the pathetic 1940 murder of Johnny Tyke by Blackjack Ward, two Western movie extras acting out a bad script at their hangout at Gower Gulch. Marlowe is sympathetic and thoughtful, and it’s nice to see him again.

But soon, the location shifts to a pastiche of the Sternwood Mansion, then to a strange approximation of Skid Row, and a lesbian club on the Sunset Strip, with a meandering plot, pointless asides and characters that don’t stick. Marlowe deserves better company, and so do readers.

Los Angeles is alive in every real Philip Marlowe story, and when you read one, you are there and you know it. In Denise Mina’s Los Angeles, cicadas buzz, a man who lives in Chavez Ravine runs a lunch counter “over by the docks,” Pico-Union is an upscale, white-only neighborhood, the Bradbury elevator operator is a man and the Pantry’s server is a waitress, and one of the last scenes makes a big deal of a character showing up with a bunch of jacaranda flowers—a riff on an effective earlier bit about those magnificent purple trees that here falls damp and filthy like their blossoms do on our cars, in the real Los Angeles.

It is plain that nobody who knows anything about the city read this novel before publication, and that’s a shame. If the London-based Raymond Chandler Estate cared more about this character or about Los Angeles, we know wonderful and convincing stories could still be spun out from his orbit. Until then, we’re going back to the canon and looking for mysteries Chandler left for us to sleuth out.

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This Saturday’s walking tour is a time travel trip up from Sunset Boulevard to explore the Victorian landmarks of Angelino Heights and Carroll Avenue, an early streetcar suburb that has been home to generations of interesting characters, and a fiend or two. We’ll begin at Guisados, so you can be fueled by tacos on the trek. And next week. it’s the return of the Charles Bukowski bus tour. Join us, do!

yours for Los Angeles,

Kim & Richard

Esotouric

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UPCOMING BUS & WALKING TOURS

• Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue Walk (Sat. 8/5) • Charles Bukowski’s Los Angeles Bus Tour (Sat. 8/12) • Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice Crime Bus Tour (Sat. 8/26) • Pasadena Confidential Crime Bus Tour (Sat. 9/9) • Franklin Village Old Hollywood Walking Tour (Sat. 9/16) • University Park Walking Tour (Sat. 9/23) • Weird West Adams Crime Bus Tour (Sat. 9/30) • Eastside Babylon Crime Bus Tour (Sat. 10/14) • The Birth of Noir: James M. Cain’s Southern California Nightmare Bus Tour (Sat. 10/21) • The Real Black Dahlia Crime Bus Tour (Sat. 10/28) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 Walking Tour (Sun. 10/29)