Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles

Elizabeth Ward and Alain Silver know their way around the City of Angels, its buildings and boulevards, its alleyways and environs, as well as Philip Marlowe. So get in your Oldsmobile and put the top down for this literary tour of a Lala Land that partly no longer exists and sometimes never was--for Raymond Chandler's locales, as the authors note, are "a pastiche of the real and the imagined." Mostly what we have here is the visual equivalent. Silver Lake became the less glamorous Gray Lake in the novelist's cynical prose; the fabled Bradbury Building (seen in the 1969 film Marlowe) became the Belfont. City hall is for real, of course, but nothing is quite what it seems.