On Raymond Chandler's 138th birthday, a miasma spreads across his noir city
Gentle reader,
On this day in 1888, a baby was born in Chicago to an alcoholic railroad engineer and a highly-strung Irish immigrant.
They named him Raymond Thornton Chandler, and through a series of astonishing twists of fate and pique, he grew up to find himself in the oil business in Downtown Los Angeles, just as public and private corruption set their claws into everything of value in the town.
Chandler, who had wanted to be a critic and writer of fantasy fiction, but lacked the private income and connections to build a career in Bloomsbury London, turned his gimlet eye on the fascinating, horrible rogues who were carving up Los Angeles.
He imagined a white knight private detective called Philip Marlowe, rough around the edges but gentle as a cat, who could navigate the halls of power and the sleaziest dives, explaining Los Angeles and damning its villains in prose—even if they never were held accountable in life.
Lately, we’ve been waking up feeling like Marlowe coming back to consciousness after getting sapped as the morning mist forms, then crawls across the east side of the city. It brings with it the stench of millions of dead creatures, bound for restaurants and food trucks and supermarkets, who instead were cooked in the Lineage warehouse solar panel fire, flooded with fire suppression chemicals and now rot in place.
The rancid reek of decomposition is instantly recognizable to the lizard brain as a threat, and when it wakes you from a sound sleep, it’s with a racing, anxious heart and sense of dread.
We sleep more than five miles from the Boyle Heights disaster site, which is surrounded by homes and businesses. We can’t imagine how they are suffering.
Mayor Karen Bass told her donors whose building is filled with putrid death that they could take 45 days to clean it up. LA Material has just reported that the Mayor’s unpaid advisor Yusef Robb, recently hired to advise those donors on the P.R. crisis, was lurking on the Mayor’s WhatsApp channel, monitoring press inquiries, shaping their corporate response through the lens of the Mayor’s team’s discussions.
If that sounds unethical, it’s because it is unethical.
It’s still Raymond Chandler’s noir city, filled with rogues and self-dealers and well-placed idiots driving the civic ship onto the rocks while the happy few bank obscene profits. But in Chandler’s lifetime, the bad guys knew enough to take care of the city they were looting, to keep the rubes smiling while their pockets were picked. No more.
Next Saturday, we’ll be conjuring up the spirit of the author as we tour Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown L.A. in a belated 138th birthday stroll.
This period in his life is lightly fictionalized in Kim’s mystery novel The Kept Girl, which is on sale for 50% off on our website in honor of Chandler’s birthday from today through Sunday when you use the code word MIASMA.
Miasma theory dates back to the Greeks, who Chandler studied closely at Dulwich College. They believed that the heavy, foul night air that brought the stench of filth into peoples’ homes also brought communicable disease.
In the 19th century, the danger of miasma was still feared, and is one reason that the early Los Angeles cemeteries clustered around the Plaza were decommissioned and moved to the outskirts of town as the population grew.
On Saturday, we’re giving our tour of Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 and there is a slim chance that we will encounter whiffs of the Lineage warehouse fire stench on our walk. So if you’re joining us, bring a little jar of Vick’s VapoRub or Tiger Balm to cut the smell, a little trick we learned from our friends at the morgue, or a pocket full of posey like they did in Black Death plague times.
On this stroll through the oldest and most fascinating commercial cemetery in Los Angeles, we’ll encounter carnies and cult leaders, the real-life Perry Mason and the creative kids who brought Day of the Dead to California, and so many more wonderful characters of old Los Angeles whose stories will haunt you. Join us, do!
Plus, just added to our calendar, by popular demand: Know Your Downtown Los Angeles, with a stop to explore Ernest Batchelder’s tile wonderland Dutch Chocolate Shop. Tickets are going fast, so don’t miss your chance to see it for yourself.
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
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UPCOMING WALKING TOURS
• Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (7/25) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown L.A. (8/1) • Film Noir / Real Noir (8/8) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (8/29) • Franklin Village Old Hollywood (9/12) • Know Your Downtown Los Angeles (9/19) • Westlake Park Time Travel Trip (9/26) • Bunker Noir! True Crime on Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill with Nathan Marsak (10/3) • Charles Bukowski’s Westlake (10/10) • Film Noir / Real Noir (10/24) • Hallowe’en at Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (10/31) • The Real Black Dahlia (11/7) • Richard’s Birthday Weird West Adams Tour & Elmer McCurdy Museum Visit (11/14) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (11/21) • Hollywood Noir (11/28)
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