Chandler: The Photographs

Okay, I was a bit snarky about Raymond Chandler recently. But a new book called Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler's Imagined City certainly deserves attention. It's a collection of photographs by Catherine Corman (editor of Joseph Cornell's Dreams), an oversize paperback just published by Charta.

Corman has taken excellent black and white photographs of all those ominous, forbidding Los Angeles locations described by Chandler in his novels. From Malibu Pier to the Hollywood Sign, from Union Station to the Beverly Hills Hotel, from MGM Studios to Musso and Frank's Grill, these locales form the geography of Chandler's imagination, and conjure a world not yet entirely vanished. Clive James wrote of Chandler's fascination with Los Angeles that "when he said that it had as much personality as a paper cup, he was saying what he liked about it." But Chandler was also drawn to the Hopperesque loneliness of the city, to that sense of isolate existences that never merge. In these photographs, Corman has given us, as Jonathan Lethem writes in his preface, "a supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places... these streets and buildings we have erected in order to give order to our solitudes."