>
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-rayner4nov04,0,3767900.story?coll=la-books-center
>
Also in the SF CHRONICLE last Sunday, here is a
snippet...
The Long Embrace Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved By
Judith Freeman PANTHEON; 353 PAGES; $25.95 Raymond Chandler
arrived in Los Angeles in 1912, a year before William
Mulholland built the aqueduct that made possible the largest
internal migration in the history of the United States. The
city's population soared during the next decade, and Chandler
witnessed Los Angeles' meteoric rise, chronicling the era's
licentiousness and graft in his fiction. The ruthless thugs,
crooked cops and narcotized sexpots of Chandler's work
brought the seedier side of Los Angeles to a wide readership
and created a popular vision of the city's sinister origins
that would later be taken up by movies such as
"Chinatown."
Blessed with perpetually warm weather and abundant real
estate, Los Angeles at first seemed to offer a tranquil,
uncomplicated life to the people who settled there, many of
whom were fleeing the harsh winters of the Midwest. Chandler
watched that optimism disintegrate over the years, as
organized crime and government corruption took root. In his
novels, short stories and screenplays, Chandler refracted the
spotless white sunshine that attracted millions of the city's
inhabitants into the noirish grays of a new American
demonology.
rest at
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/04/RVICST381.DTL&hw=chandler&sn=001&sc=1000
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