Shamus Town: The Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler
Loren latker’s excellent Shamus Town website is an increasingly important repository of all things Raymond Chandler. The site now includes hundreds of photographs of LA in Chandler’s time and in the present as well as many scanned documents relating to Chandler himself. For anyone researching Chandler, having access to his birth certificate and school records via the Raymond Chandler Timeline is invaluable. Latker also has podcast tours of Chandler’s LA. The site has recently been updated and there are lots of good things on the way. Loren writes:
The new timeline is up! It now starts in 1858 with the birth of Morris, or Maurice, B Chandler. I’ve added many popup images for Ray’s birth certificate, his school records, a Laramie new item about an M Chandler attending a party in 1886, obits about his uncle Fitt’s brother and his aunt Francis Grace. I also found the document from 1927 where Ray started the process to regain his U.S. Citizenship. From that we learn that after WWI he returned to Canada, made is way to Victoria BC, boarded the Governor bound
for San Francisco and arrived in March of 1919. He and [Florence, his mother] were living at the West 12th Street address then.In the True Crime section I added two images. I already had an image of rich Ned dead on the floor of Greystone taken from Leslie White’s wonderful “Me, Detective.” However, I won an auction (don’t ask how much!) for two 1929 8×10 crime scene photos. One is the same rich Ned dead that White had in his
book, but the other is of poor Hugh Plunket dead on the floor as well. 8x10s scanned at 1200 DPI make wonderfully large digital images! The photo of Plunket probably hasn’t been seen since 1929! I made them into very large popup images – they look great!Coming up I want to record the narration of the two rides I have the video done for and add them as Podcasts. I want to finish the section I started about Dorothy Fisher nee Gruber, Chandler’s secretary and add the good parts of her audio interview we did, along with the transcript, and pictures of letters Ray sent her.
Link to Shamus Town. More on Chandler’s early life here.
Detroit in the Fiction of Elmore Leonard
This Christmas I read several of Elmore Leonard’s classic crime novels. Leonard really is one of the greatest American crime writers. His novels are hard-hitting, unpretentious, original and blackly comic tales. Leonard’s novels usually feature a cast of characters from differing backgrounds and professions (both criminal and legitimate) that he brings together in what read as seamlessly interwoven narratives.
Only on question has been bothering me about Leonard’s work — is his depiction of Detroit rather tame? Leonard was born in New Orleans, but his family settled in Detroit when he was a child. The author’s bio in his books usually states Leonard lives in the wider Detroit area, which probably means he lives in the more salubrious Grosse Point or Bloomfield Village, which some would argue are not really part of Detroit. Detroit has been in terminal decline over the past forty years. There are many reasons for this, including the collapse of the American car industry, the race riots of the 1960s, and the ‘White Flight’ — the Caucasian population fled from the city to the suburbs to escape the rising crime rate. Perhaps as so many of Detroit’s social problems are rooted in the politically incendiary subject of race, Leonard avoids the subject so as not to bog his books down in controversy. The population of the city is 81.6% black, according to the last census. Most of the black population live in the inner city, often in sub-standard housing. This leads to added tension as many of the whites, who live in the suburbs and townships surrounding the city, blame the black population for the high crime rate.
Leonard does not entirely avoids these issues: Killshot (1989) makes some interesting comparisons between crime-ridden Detroit and rural Michigan, an area dominated by hunters and Evangelical Christians. 52 Pick-Up (1974) features a scene in which a coach full of tourists on a historical tour of Detroit is held-up, and all the passengers have their belongings stolen. Fairly shocking, but to my knowledge Detroit is now considered too dangerous to run historical tours. My wife is from Detroit, and I’ve come to know the city quite well over the past few years. I like it, and I hope one day it will reclaim its former reputation as being one of America’s greatest cities. Before then, it will have to move on from the damage inflicted by the corrupt Mayoralty of Kwame Kilpatrick, and the shocking story reported in the Times that the city can no longer afford to bury its own dead.
The last time I was in Detroit was this past summer, and the big news story was of a shootout at a city bus-stop. You can watch footage of the incident below.
The Writer or the Critic: Who Is the Best Judge?
A recent article in The Guardian, Is James Ellroy the best judge of his own novels?, examines Ellroy’s strange disowning of his novel The Cold Six Thousand (2001). Critics and readers found the harsh, clipped and dialectic prose style (which is sometimes called Ellrovian prose) of The Cold Six Thousand far too jarring and difficult to read. Many reviewers were scathing of the novel, and Ellroy has come to agree with their analysis. Perhaps Ellroy is being too harsh on himself. I believe The Cold Six Thousand is flawed, and the prose style is a distraction, but the plotting and structure is thrilling. If you can get to grips with Ellroy’s writing style, you are left with a remarkable fictionalised account of five years of American history from 1963 to 1968, including the Civil Rights movement, the escalation of the war in Vietnam and concluding with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
Ellroy did his utmost to promote the novel at the time it was released, so perhaps his change of opinion regarding its merit is in itself a publicity stunt. By disowning his previous work he creates excitement for his forthcoming novels (which he will always promote as being bigger and better). After all, Ellroy has expressed some harsh judgements on some of his other work. With some critics there is already an inbuilt hostility to crime and mystery fiction, so it is not a surprise that crime writers have to steel themselves to harsh criticism or sometimes talk down their own work or grow to dislike it. Mickey Spillane insisted he was a writer not an author. Arthur Conan Doyle grew weary of his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, as did Ian Fleming of James Bond. I’m also not sure writers should always be trusted when they give opinions as to which is their best book. Norman Mailer insisted his bloated fictional history of the CIA, Harlot’s Ghost (1991) was his best novel, but there are few critics who would agree with him. On the other hand, Ellroy’s dismissive attitude to some of his previous novels may have created a situation in which readers and critics no longer trust his views on his own work.
Orson Welles – Radio Days Sketch
It’s Christmas, so I don’t want to post anything too dark. I thought you might enjoy this wonderful Orson Welles monologue and sketch taken from the very first Dean Martin Show in 1967. Welles talks about his time as a radio actor, writer and director. The greatest period in Welles’ radio career was in the late 1930’s and early 40’s, (Old Time Radio Show Catalog has an excellent summation of this Golden period). Welles briefly describes the many roles he played, including The Shadow: ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.’ Alas, he does not mention the infamous 1938 War of the Worlds production that terrified America. Welles’ monologue is followed by a very funny sketch about a Private Eye show, which features Welles as a radio actor and Dean Martin as an overworked sound effects man.
James Ellroy to Write Second LA Quartet
James Ellroy has sold his next four novels to Heinemann for a six-figure sum. The first novel is to be titled Perfidia, and is scheduled for release in 2012. The Bookseller has the story:
The four novels will be set in Los Angeles during the Second World War and will “seamlessly cohere” with the previous quartet and the more recent Underworld USA trilogy, the publisher said, taking major and minor characters from those books and spotlighting them as younger people. Together, the 11 novels will highlight 31 years of American history in “an unprecedented and ambitious manner”.
Mike Davis – James Ellroy’s Harshest Critic
The reviews for James Ellroy’s latest novel Blood’s a Rover have been overwhelming positive. The stature of a novel can change over time, and I suspect that some criticisms of the structure will slowly emerge. However, by and large, readers and reviewers seem to be in agreement that Blood’s a Rover is a thrilling conclusion to Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy. One person who will not be giving the novel a good review, I suspect, is the social commentator, urban theorist, historian, political activist and professional James Ellroy-hater, Mike Davis. In his acclaimed work, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (1990), Davis wrote an engrossing study of the socio-economic and cultural problems in Los Angeles. He also used the book to take a few potshots at the novels of the man he loves to hate, James Ellroy:
His Los Angeles Quartet, depending on one’s viewpoint, is either the culmination of the genre, or its reductio ad absurdum. At times an almost unendurable wordstorm of perversity and gore, Quartet attempts to map the history of modern Los Angeles as a secret continuum of sex crimes, satanic conspiracies, and political scandals. For Ellroy, the grisly, unsolved ‘Black Dahlia’ case of 1947 is the crucial symbolic commencement of the postwar era – a local ‘name of the rose’ concealing a larger metaphysical mystery. Yet in building such an all- encompassing noir mythology, Ellroy risks extinguishing the genre’s tensions, and inevitably its power. In his pitch blackness there is no light left to cast shadows and evil becomes a forensic banality. The result feels very much like the actual moral texture of the Reagen-Bush era: a supersaturation of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest.
I do not agree with Davis’ analysis of the Quartet novels here, for instance where in Ellroy’s work do you find ‘Satanic conspiracies’? His work is dark, but he’s not Stephen King. Nor do I think he is guilty of ‘extinguishing the genre’s tension’. Ellroy deserves credit for reinvigorating the crime fiction genre in his revisionism of Los Angeles history in the Quartet and American history in Underworld U.S.A. On the other hand, Davis’ description of Ellroy’s prose style as an ‘unendurable wordstorm’ is quite prophetic. The clipped, sparse, dialectic prose style which is so thrilling in L.A. Confidential (1990) and White Jazz (1992), is taken to extremes in The Cold Six Thousand (2001), and forced dozens of reviewers to give up reading the novel.
Shortly after this contentious, but still reasonable critique of Ellroy’s work, Davis launched another attack on the author in the Chicago Review of Books. This time Davis seemed to give up even attempting to be analytical in his tirade:
Now let me tell you who I can’t stand, and to top the list I would put that neo-Nazi in American writing who is James Ellroy… And to begin with he’s not a good writer. He’s a kind of methamphetamine caricature of Raymond Chandler… Each of his books is practically a Mein Kampf, it’s anti-communistic, it’s anti-Mexican, and it’s racist.
It would be easy to dismiss these words as an angry rant, but if we were to take them seriously it soon becomes clear they are patently false. Firstly, Ellroy has not written a Chandleresque novel since his debut work, Brown’s Requiem (1981). He frequently argues that Chandler’s contribution to the genre is overrated and does not seek to replicate his work, even through caricature. Ellroy is not a neo-Nazi. The novels feature racist asides through the subjective third person narration of characters who are racist. But, even then, the racism is only a casual attribute of the characters and not a defining characteristic. What Davis does not mention is that Ellroy’s novels feature inter-racial relationships, sympatheitic portrayals of homosexuals and men who pay a very high price for their sins. Ellroy would probably consider himself an anti-communist, but so what? Davis seems to consider Ellroy’s work an affront to his own far-Left beliefs, in doing so his criticisms of the author seem shrill and hysterical.
Roy Hoopes and James M. Cain
Roy Hoopes, whose 1982 biography of James M. Cain remains the definitive work on the hard-boiled writer, died on December 1st aged 87. Though Hoopes was a consummate professional, a prolific writer of newspaper and magazine articles as well as over 30 books, his long, remarkable book on Cain is the one that is remembered. I remember reading it some time in the early 1990s and being impressed with its breadth, as well as the amount of detail Hoopes had managed to wrest from Cain himself. The Washington Post has an obituary of Hoopes, but it’s ‘Post Mortem’ column this week also has a piece on Cain by Matt Schudel:
… Not many people know that Cain was born in Annapolis in 1892 and grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where his father was president of Washington College.
Even fewer people seem to realize that Cain spent a good deal of time in Washington. He studied singing here (his earliest ambition was to be an opera singer), sold records at the old Kann’s department store in 1914 and was sitting in Lafayette Square one day, when he decided he was going to be a writer.
Literary Feuds – Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer
Literary feuds, like pseudonyms or author campaigns are usually devised as a calculated career move. If one writer is in a dispute with another, it can sometimes be beneficial for both of their careers. The warring writers Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer had other sources of publicity besides their feud. Gore Vidal wrote mystery novels in the early 50’s under the pseudonym Edgar Box. He would not confess to the pseudonym until 1978 as he felt being associated with the mystery genre would damage his reputation. Norman Mailer received significant publicity for his campaign to secure the release of convicted murderer Jack Abbott. The campaign backfired when Abbott stabbed a man to death only six weeks after being paroled.
Vidal and Mailer were often in feuds with other writers, and there is nothing to suggest this did their profile any harm. It is fitting, then, that for many years there was some genuine animosity between the two novelists. Their relationship reached its nadir on a now legendary episode of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971. A drunken Mailer confronted Vidal about an article he had written for the New York Review of Books. Vidal had compared Mailer to Charles Manson in a not so subtle hint concerning the infamous incident in which Mailer stabbed and seriously injured his second wife Adele Morales. Mailer’s obnoxious behaviour on the set of the show turned Vidal, Cavett, fellow guest Janet Flanner and the entire audience against him.
Below is a clip of the most memorable moment of the episode:
Poe’s Tamerlane Sells for $662K
Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter dominated the news about the Christie’s literary auction today, but there were other gems on sale as well. Apart from a first American edition of Moby Dick, a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane and other Poems, published in 1827 made $662,000, a record for American literature. Recession? What recession? The Telegraph has the story:
The copy of “Tamerlane and Other Poems”, published by Poe anonymously in 1827 when he was just 13, had been estimated to sell for between $500,000 and $700,000 (£ 302,000 to £442,000).
The previous record was $250,000 for a copy of the same book sold nearly two decades ago. No more than 40 or 50 copies were ever printed – of which only 12 are believed to remain in existence.
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Film Noir Fashion
Claudia Schiffer recently starred in the art exhibition ‘Capturing Claudia’ at the Colnaghi gallery in London. The exhibition features Ms Schiffer posing as a film noir heroine in a pastiche of forties and fifties cinema.
Not only the art world but fashion itself has also shown a recent interest in film noir. A fashion article in The Daily Telegraph features the Russian model Maryna Linchuk, showcasing a new film noir inspired fashion, including a velvet Armani dress which costs as much as £4,000.
Any retrospective look at film noir is to be welcomed. But perhaps there is a danger that by portraying the world of film noir primarily as one of wealth and sophistication, it will encourage reductive perceptions (or indeed misleading ones) as to what these films were truly like. I may be making too much of this, art exhibitions and fashion shoots do not have the same narrative depth as films. But if we just remember film noir for its glamour we might risk what Mike Davis might describe as a ‘supersaturation of the genre’.
Over at FashionatFilm, Rosa Burger has posted an excellent and wideranging study of the influence of fashion in the film noir genre, ‘Film Costume – Women in Film Noir’.
The Venetian Vase 