Welcome to Marlowe’s World

OK, so I was a bit snarky about Raymond Chandler recently. But it’s time to forgive and forget ... and give our attention instead to the publication of an oversize new paperback book called Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City (Charta). Inside its covers are photographs by Catherine Corman, the daughter of filmmaker Roger Corman and the editor of Joseph Cornell’s Dreams (2007).

Corman has taken excellent black-and-white shots of many of those menacing, memorable Los Angeles locations described by Chandler in his novels. From Lido Pier to the iconic Hollywood sign, from MGM Studios to Musso and Frank’s Grill, from Union Station to Bullocks Wilshire, these locales were integral to the L.A. of Chandler’s rich imagination. They also conjure a world that has not yet entirely vanished. Of Chandler’s fascination with his adopted hometown, author-critic Clive James once remarked: “[W]hen he said that it had as much personality as a paper cup, he was saying what he liked about it.” The creator of private eye Philip Marlowe was especially attracted to L.A.’s Hopperesque loneliness, all the “anonymous multitudes whose solitude fills the city,” to quote from Corman’s introduction.

Corman’s images, paired with quotes from Chandler’s novels, give us what Jonathan Lethem, in his preface, calls “a supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places ... these streets and buildings we have erected in order to give order to our solitudes.”