I’ve come a little belatedly to a book by Catherine Corman titled “Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City.” I like it a lot, but then I would. I’ve never met any writer in Los Angeles who didn’t actively love Raymond Chandler, and not many photographers either.
There’s always a “visual” element in Chandler’s work, by which I mean that you “see” the world through his, or Marlowe’s, eyes. And there have been various books on Raymond Chandler’s LA, generally well-meaning tomes with some slightly so-so photographs of the city, but Catherine Corman is the real deal. For one thing, she’s Roger Corman’s daughter, so her LA pedigree is unimpeachable, and she can certainly do the noir look herself when she puts her mind to it.
Daylight Noir consists of 50 or so moody, arty, square-format, black and white photographs, mostly architectural in some sense, some of them showing very specific LA locations, some of them kind of generic. And attached to each is a quotation from Chandler. Again, some of which are very recognizable, some less so.
The book has an introduction by Jonathan Lethem (a seal of approval for sure) in which he says, “If architecture is fate, then it is Marlowe’s fate to enumerate the pensive dooms of Los Angeles, the fatal, gorgeous pretenses of glamour and ease, the bogus histories reenacted in the dumb, paste-and-spangles cocktail of style.’ Yes, Jonathan, but what if architecture ISN’T fate?
But anyway, it’s surely a good sign that Catherine Corman’s book sent me back to rereading Chandler’s novels, keeping an eye out for architectural detail. Of course in The Big Sleep we all remember the hall of the Sternwood mansion, the entrance doors big enough to let in a troop of elephants, and the stained glass showing a knight rescuing a damsel in distress (that’s got to be pretty colorful, right?).
At the back of the house there’s a “wide sweep of emerald grass and a maroon Packard,” and when Marlowe gets into the greenhouse where he meets the General, “The light had an unreal greenish color, like light filtered through an aquarium tanks.” I’m seeing a fair amount of color, aren’t you?
And when Marlowe gets to Geiger’s house, oh boy, there’s a thick pinkish Chinese rug, a broad low divan of old rose tapestry with some lilac-colored silk underwear strewn across it, a couple of standing lamps with jade-green shades, and a yellow satin cushion. Carmen Sternwood is there, sitting naked on a fringed orange shawl. OK, maybe that’s décor rather than architecture, but nevertheless this is some very colorful nor.
Now obviously I wasn’t around in Chandler’s time, but as I walk around LA these days it looks like the most intensely colored cities I’ve ever been to. Sure the color may be only skin (or stucco) deep, and sure there may be some dark things happening behind those cheerfully colored walls, but that's the nature of the beast, right?
One of the architectural touchstones from my earliest days of walking around in LA is the Blu Monkey Lounge on Hollywood Boulevard. When I first saw it, it looked like this:
It seemed intriguing, secretive, vaguely sinister, a dive bar where bad things might happen. A little research suggested it was in fact just a loud bar with DJs and expensive drinks, not exactly a rarity in Hollywood, and not really my kind of place. A little while late it looked like this:
I guess it was in some transient state as all the buildings around it get gentrified,
demolished or refurbished. Maybe it was just being repainted. Anyway, the last time I saw it, it looked it was like this:
You’ll notice that the word “monkey” has disappeared from the name. And I guess that stucco is still a kind blue, but it doesn’t yell “blue” the way it once did. Isn’t it aquamarine, or maybe turquoise? The Case of the Absent Monkey? Well, maybe there is something noir-sounding about that after all.
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