Find L.A.’s Mean Streets During Bouchercon

There’s a special treat being planned for all of those people who expect to be in Long Beach, California, for the opening day of next month’s Bouchercon. The quirky “bus adventures” company Esotouric has scheduled a special, all-day Raymond Chandler tour of Los Angeles on Wednesday, November 12, expressly for early bird arrivals.

Kim Cooper, who with her husband operates Esotouric (and is the author of The Kept Girl, a fascinating mystery featuring Chandler, released earlier this year) tells me that this extended excursion--“Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles: In a Lonely Place”--will depart from the convention hotel (the Hyatt Regency Long Beach, 200 South Pine Avenue) on Wednesday at 9 a.m. Check-in is at 8:30 a.m. The cost to participate will be $90 per person. This tour will conclude at 5 p.m. back at the Hyatt Regency. “We think it’s just the thing for the visiting mystery lover,” remarks Cooper.

A press release calls this tour “a detail-drenched exploration of the 20th-century city that shaped Chandler’s fiction, and that in turn shaped his hard-boiled times. The route stretches from the Art Deco gems of downtown Los Angeles to the mean streets of Hollywood, featuring locations where Chandler worked, drank, or set memorable scenes from his books and screenplays. Locations include The Oviatt Building (The Lady in the Lake), the Hotel Van Nuys (The Little Sister), Bullock’s Wilshire (The Big Sleep), The Bryson (The Lady in the Lake), Paramount Studios (Double Indemnity), Hollywood Boulevard (“Raymond Chandler Square”), the historic Larry Edmunds Bookshop, and beyond. Drawing on published and unpublished work, private correspondence, screenplays, and film adaptations, the tour traces Chandler’s search for meaning and his anti-hero Philip Marlowe’s adventures in detection, which lead them both down the rabbit hole of isolation, depression, and drink. The tour is a revealing time-travel journey into the literary history of Los Angeles, and a rare chance to soak up that atmosphere with others who love noir fiction.”

For more information or to register, simply click here and go to the bottom of the page, or call (213) 373-1947.