by Dan Moren
The Los Angeles of The Big Sleep
Fantastic post from Scouting Los Angeles’s Nick Carr, who retraces the plot of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep in modern day L.A.:
The best part of your hard-boiled adventures? The Los Angeles locations you refer to are all real. Oh, sure, you use fake street names and addresses, but your descriptions are so vivid and precise that if one were take the time to look, one could tell exactly what you’re referring to and retrace your steps.
Which is just what I did.
But sorry, Marlowe — I’m hogging the floor and I know how much you like to talk. So take it away — and let’s see what still remains of your 1930s noir-soaked Los Angeles…
Chandler’s one of my very favorite writers, and The Big Sleep is his best known work1, though there isn’t a book he’s written that I don’t enjoy.
Sadly, a lot of the places of the era are now gone, subsumed into the modern day metropolis, but more than a few still remain. If you’re a noir fan at all, you owe it to yourself to scroll through and check out the images of yesteryear L.A.
- Howard Hawks’s 1946 adaptation, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, is, needless to say, also a classic. ↩