The Annotated Big Sleep Page 10

  17. Some early traffic light systems lacked the now-standard yellow caution light. LA’s system included a loud bell to warn of the change between stop and go. Chandler captures the sound to enliven the street with a symphony of tooting, grunting, grumbling, and gonging.

  18. For his first tail job, Marlowe—the detective most associated with a car until Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer—is on foot. The phrase might lead us to believe that he is driving (pedestrians rarely “pull up” beside somebody), and indeed Los Angeles was already a city thought to be best traversed by car. In 1927, journalist Bruce Bliven wrote in The New Republic that Los Angeles “is now a completely motorized civilization. Nowhere else in the world have human beings so thoroughly adapted themselves to the automobile.” Chandler himself, with other LA writers of the thirties, helped cement this image in the popular imagination, not only with his novels but with his work on the film version of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. The story revolves around a car insurance scam involving a supposedly accidental railway death. It opens with LA’s downtown viewed through the window of a speeding automobile; in those opening moments you can also see and hear the early Los Angeles traffic light, as described in the previous note.

  19. The route is impossible to follow now. As part of their research for this edition, the editors abandoned their cars and tried to follow Marlowe’s footsteps, to no avail. We were not the first to be tempted to tail Marlowe’s tail job: as another hapless pedestrian, Geoff Nicholson, writes in The Lost Art of Walking: “The first part of the walk is easily replicated, but by the end you’ll find yourself walking into Hollywood and Highland, a corporate, multi-story shopping mall.”

  Chandler is famous for mapping LA’s real streets and neighborhoods in his fiction, and the reader’s temptation to follow Marlowe’s footsteps is a testament to the author’s skill. Chandler wasn’t the first LA noir writer to steer readers through the streets of Hollywood: Paul Cain’s Fast One (1932) preceded him with passages like this: “Kells drove up Wilcox to Cahuenga, up Cahuenga to Iris, turned up the short curving slope to Cullen’s house….He went back down and closed the garage doors and walked down Cahuenga to Franklin.” Chandler covers more ground and takes the time to notice the details. So indelibly has he left his mark on the city that a mini-industry of books, maps, and tours of “Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles” thrives today.

  Of course, now readers of crime fiction expect this type of realism. Detectives like Harry Hole (Oslo), Aimée Leduc (Paris), and Sonchai Jitpleecheep (Bangkok) are expert guides to their respective cities, and crime novelists like Jo Nesbø, Cara Black, and John Burdett (creators of the aforementioned detectives) treat their settings as seriously as do travel writers.

  Publicity for Esotouric’s Raymond Chandler bus tours of Los Angeles. Historian, Chandler scholar, and novelist Kim Cooper conducts tours with husband and cohost Richard Schave.

  20. First built in Pasadena in 1909, bungalow courts flourished in LA through the 1930s and are still characteristic of Hollywood, where they were built to house the hordes working or seeking work in the studios. Cottages arranged around a communal outdoor area, the courts offered the luxury of yard space and the privacy of a freestanding home to working-class and transient renters. Nathanael West places some of The Day of the Locust (published the same year as TBS) in Gower Gulch, a neighborhood that featured bungalows that often housed real cowboys looking for work in pictures. Much of hard-boiled writer Horace McCoy’s 1938 Hollywood novel I Should Have Stayed Home takes place in the close confines of the courts, the little houses acting as a stage for the comings and goings of his characters. Currently the surviving buildings are considered quite chic, and a bungalow in the Hollywood Hills can sell for well over a million dollars.

  Bungalow court

  21. Los Angeles was and is an eclectic jumble of architectural styles. The movie sets don’t end where the city begins. The hodgepodge effect was a frequent target of critics of Los Angeles from Edmund Wilson to Nathanael West, who wrote in The Day of the Locust, “Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss Chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of styles that lined the slopes of the canyon.” The “La Baba” would have probably been built in the 1920s, capitalizing on the Orientalist craze inspired in part by the “Arabian” sets of 1924’s wildly popular The Thief of Baghdad.

  22. One of the tales in The 1001 (or Arabian) Nights, in which large jars of oil figure prominently. The ersatz fairy-tale landscape provides a strangely appropriate backdrop to the action, which recalls the trappings of adventure stories: furtive movements behind trees, secrets and hiding, mounting suspense, all culminating with a kind of buried treasure.

  23. This is the second mention of a tree that was once as emblematic of Los Angeles as the palm. Like the palm, the eucalyptus, and most other trees in LA, it is not a native. First planted by the Spanish padres to shade the missions, pepper trees were enthusiastically adopted by Anglo Angelenos, who lined the boulevards with the graceful shade trees. Many of these were later replaced by palms when it was found that pepper trees hosted black scale, a pest fatal to citrus crops.

  Pepper trees were some of the first arrivals in the young city of Hollywood: in 1896 Harvey Henderson Wilcox, the founder of Hollywood, planted them along a freshly laid road—today’s Hollywood Boulevard—and began selling lots to the brand-new subdivision. The trees were removed in the 1920s because they blocked store signs on the commercial strip, despite a storm of protests to save them, including a campaign led by the actress Mary Pickford.

  Pepper trees, Los Angeles

  FIVE

  Back on the boulevard I went into a drugstore phone booth1 and looked up Mr. Arthur Gwynn Geiger’s residence. He lived on Laverne Terrace,2 a hillside street off Laurel Canyon Boulevard.3 I dropped my nickel and dialed his number just for fun. Nobody answered. I turned to the classified section and noted a couple of bookstores within blocks of where I was.4

  The first I came to was on the north side, a large lower floor devoted to stationery and office supplies, a mass of books on the mezzanine. It didn’t look the right place. I crossed the street and walked two blocks east to the other one. This was more like it, a narrowed cluttered little shop stacked with books from floor to ceiling and four or five browsers taking their time putting thumb marks on the new jackets. Nobody paid any attention to them. I shoved on back into the store, passed through a partition and found a small dark woman reading a law book at a desk.

  I flipped my wallet open on her desk and let her look at the buzzer5 pinned to the flap. She looked at it, took her glasses off and leaned back in her chair.6 I put the wallet away. She had the fine-drawn face of an intelligent Jewess. She stared at me and said nothing.

  I said: “Would you do me a favor, a very small favor?”

  “I don’t know. What is it?” She had a smoothly husky voice.

  “You know Geiger’s store across the street, two blocks west?”

  “I think I may have passed it.”

  “It’s a bookstore,” I said. “Not your kind of a bookstore.7 You know darn well.”

  She curled her lip slightly and said nothing. “You know Geiger by sight?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know Mr. Geiger.”

  “Then you couldn’t tell me what he looks like?”

  Her lip curled some more. “Why should I?”

  “No reason at all. If you don’t want to, I can’t make you.”

  She looked out through the partition door and leaned back again. “That was a sheriff’s star, wasn’t it?”

  “Honorary deputy. Doesn’t mean a thing. It’s worth a dime cigar.”8

  “I see.” She reached for a pack of cigarettes and shook one loose and reached for it with her lips. I held a match f
or her. She thanked me, leaned back again and regarded me through smoke. She said carefully:

  “You wish to know what he looks like and you don’t want to interview him?”

  “He’s not there,” I said.

  “I presume he will be. After all, it’s his store.”

  “I don’t want to interview him just yet,” I said.

  She looked out through the open doorway again. I said: “Know anything about rare books?”

  “You could try me.”

  “Would you have a Ben Hur, 1860, Third Edition, the one with the duplicated line on page 116?”

  She pushed her yellow law book to one side and reached a fat volume up on the desk, leafed it through, found her page, and studied it. “Nobody would,” she said without looking up. “There isn’t one.”

  “Right.”

  “What in the world are you driving at?”

  “The girl in Geiger’s store didn’t know that.”

  She looked up. “I see. You interest me. Rather vaguely.”

  “I’m a private dick9 on a case. Perhaps I ask too much. It didn’t seem much to me somehow.”

  She blew a soft gray smoke ring and poked her finger through. It came to pieces in frail wisps. She spoke smoothly, indifferently. “In his early forties, I should judge. Medium height, fattish. Would weigh about a hundred and sixty pounds. Fat face, Charlie Chan moustache,10 thick soft neck. Soft all over. Well dressed, goes without a hat, affects a knowledge of antiques and hasn’t any. Oh yes. His left eye is glass.”

  “You’d make a good cop,”11 I said.

  She put the reference book back on an open shelf at the end of her desk, and opened the law book in front of her again. “I hope not,” she said.12 She put her glasses on.

  I thanked her and left. The rain had started.13 I ran for it, with the wrapped book under my arm. My car was on a side street pointing at the boulevard almost opposite Geiger’s store. I was well sprinkled before I got there. I tumbled into the car and ran both windows up and wiped my parcel off with my handkerchief. Then I opened it up.

  I knew about what it would be, of course. A heavy book, well bound, handsomely printed in handset type on fine paper. Larded with full-page arty photographs. Photos and letterpress were alike of an indescribable filth. The book was not new. Dates were stamped on the front endpaper, in and out dates. A rent book. A lending library of elaborate smut.14

  I rewrapped the book and locked it up behind the seat. A racket15 like that, out in the open on the boulevard, seemed to mean plenty of protection. I sat there and poisoned myself with cigarette smoke and listened to the rain and thought about it.

  1. A necessity for the detective on the job, the pay phone was also the primary telephone service for the majority of Angelenos in the 1930s. The Los Angeles City Directory lists fewer than half a million phones in mid-1938, for three times as many residents.

  2. Laverne Terrace is a fictional street, like Alta Brea.

  3. Laurel Canyon Boulevard heads from Hollywood into the Hollywood Hills.

  4. Hollywood in the 1930s had its own booksellers’ row, rivaling LA’s first great book row on and around West Sixth Street downtown. The 1938 Los Angeles City Directory lists six booksellers, including Stanley Rose, in the seven blocks of Hollywood Boulevard between Highland and Cahuenga, with another bookstore around the corner on Cahuenga and two more on Vine. The renowned Pickwick Bookshop opened in the same stretch that year at 6743 Hollywood, one block east of Highland.

  5. buzzer: A police or detective’s badge.

  6. Fans of the Howard Hawks film will remember this as a flamboyantly flirtatious scene featuring a young Dorothy Malone. The Bogart/Hawks Marlowe is quite the ladies’ man, and the film abounds with sultry encounters between Marlowe and a series of friendly, independent, and sexually confident women. Hawks, the director of romantic comedies like Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Ball of Fire (1941), as well as the inaugural Bogart-Bacall flick, To Have and Have Not (1944), was a master when it came to portraying romantic chemistry on-screen; the playful, assertive “Hawks woman” was, by the time of the TBS film, an established type. The type is quite foreign to the novel, in which sexuality, when it appears, is fundamentally warped and threatening. There is no hint of wholesome Hawksian flirtatiousness in this scene as written by Chandler.

  Bogey as Marlowe, with “research assistant” Dorothy Malone. (Photofest)

  7. In other words, hers is a legitimate bookstore. In fact, censorship laws of the day meant that even legitimate bookstores were vulnerable to charges of distributing obscene literature. Pickwick Bookshop was prosecuted in 1947 for selling Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County, a rather staid book containing a few pages of explicit sex. Pickwick’s owner, Louis Epstein, recalled, “We would sell a piece of pornography from time to time, but we were very, very careful and circumspect about it. We didn’t believe in censorship even then. But we knew what would happen to us if we broke the rules.”

  Pickwick Books, Hollywood (courtesy of Wayne Braby and BookstoreMemories.com)

  8. dime cigar: A cheap cigar, but not the cheapest. In the mid-1930s many companies cut the prices of their cigars. In 1935, after their price was dropped from a dime to a nickel, Bayuk’s Phillies became the number-one-selling cigars in the country.

  9. The term probably came into popular usage with reference to Dick Donovan, protagonist in mysteries written by Joyce Emmerson Preston Muddock, first published in the “penny dreadfuls” (forerunners to the pulps) in the late nineteenth century.

  10. Charlie Chan was a fictional Chinese-American detective created by American author Earl Derr Biggers, loosely based on a real-life Hawaiian detective. The first Chan novel, The House Without a Key, was published in 1925 and gave birth to a Hollywood film series beginning in the 1930s. Intended as a corrective to the negative Hollywood stereotype of the Chinese supervillain (Fu Manchu, Emperor Ming), Chan was equally stereotypical: “inscrutable,” deferential but sly, and spouting fake Confucian sayings. The actors who played Chan in Hollywood were white. Geiger’s Charlie Chan mustache will match his Orientalist home decor.

  11. cop: From the Latin capere, “to capture” or “to seize,” thus the term “to cop a feel.” One who captures would be a “copper,” shortened back to “cop.”

  12. Like Vivian later, this “intelligent Jewess” expresses a healthy disdain for LA’s finest. Hawks’s film revises her response to “Thanks.” Chandler’s own considered assessment: “Cops are pretty dumb people.”

  13. We’ve established that 1938 was a particularly wet year, but that doesn’t explain Chandler’s fondness for rainscapes. His prior stories are soaked: not just “Killer in the Rain,” which was one of the sources of TBS. It rains throughout “Nevada Gas,” and the following year’s “Guns at Cyrano’s” begins, “Ted Carmady liked the rain; liked the feel of it; the sound of it, the smell of it.” In “The Curtain,” another source of TBS and of The Long Goodbye, Larry Batzel’s last words to the detective before he disappears are “It’s going to rain. I’d hate like hell to be buried in the rain, wouldn’t you?”

  Raymond Chandler is synonymous with Los Angeles—so where’s all the sunshine and warmth? In our post-noir world, it seems a given that Chandler’s city would be the dark, shadowy, black-and-white underside to sunny LA. But “noir” hadn’t been invented when Chandler was writing these stories, except to the extent that he, along with other hard-boiled writers, was inventing it himself. Chandler may have brought a British affinity for rainscapes—not to mention a literary taste for Gothic atmosphere—to LA, having spent his formative years in London. And the much-touted LA climate inspired some skepticism: Edmund Wilson, for one, complained of LA’s “empty sun and incessant rains,” an apt description of the weather in TBS.

  By way of comparison, it does not rain at all in the San Francisco of Hammett�
��s The Maltese Falcon, although the fog does make a cameo.

  14. The Depression era was the heyday of commercial lending libraries—as of pulp magazines—and many booksellers found it practical to have them. Drugstores, cigar stores, gift shops, and department stores had lending libraries as well, with books for rent at rates starting at two cents a day. Some specialized in pornography. Harry W. Schwartz, owner of the iconic Milwaukee bookstores, recalled,

  Many of our customers [in the early 1930s] were unable to pay their bills….We began to examine what other possibilities there existed to bring in additional revenue and fell upon the idea of adding pornography to our rental library. Pornography in those days was something clandestine and furtive, like bootlegging….The finest people drank illegal booze and some of the best customers of the speakeasies were among them; but only perverts and degenerates were supposed to read pornography. Of course we were cautious and loaned books only to people we knew. It was revealing to discover that some of our leading citizens were among our best customers.

  “Smut” was a category with a broad range in the 1930s: a lending library specializing in pornography might carry salacious pulp novels with titles like Young Desire and Broadway Virgin, “serious” medical and anthropological works on sexual deviance and exotic sexual customs, illustrated editions of unexpurgated classics like the Kama Sutra and The Decameron, and manuals on birth control. James Joyce’s Ulysses and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover were among the officially banned titles in the 1930s. Geiger apparently traffics in high-quality editions, rather than pulp paper: perhaps like those advertised by the Esoterika Biblion Society, which rented books at rates from fifty cents to five dollars a title. Interested parties would recognize code words for erotica in the ad, similar to Geiger’s “De Luxe”: “limited,” “privately printed,” “unabridged.”