Hearts of the City / Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news. : City of Light, City of Dark

Have you ever found yourself doing this? You leave the house early some morning, before breakfast. Maybe it’s March and the sun has just come up and this dewiness hangs over everything. You can smell the grass and the trees, and an elemental sweetness seems to flow over your skin. At that moment, the city becomes the place you once dreamed about, the Los Angeles of the orange-crate labels and tourist postcards. The place you always hoped you would find but never did.

And then later that day, you find yourself in another situation. You’re standing at a busy corner, say Santa Monica and Fairfax, watching a drunk trying to cross the street. The drunk is yelling at the cars and taunting the drivers, standing in their lanes while they roll up their windows and lean on their horns. A standoff ensues until the cars scoot around the drunk in a fury, and the drunk yells all the more. You watch for a while, amused by it, almost comforted by the malice that hangs in the air. It seems so familiar.

These two scenes could happen in any city, of course. But in Los Angeles, as we all know, they have meaning . Because L.A. is haunted by two images of itself. One, the picture of a sun-kissed Paradise created by the early boosters and the other, a nervous, threatening city of noir. The two images have struggled with each other for decades, but today we have an announcement to make. The struggle is no more. Noir has won.

The evidence has accumulated until it is undeniable. Virtually every memorable movie of Los Angeles, from “Murder, My Sweet” in 1944 to “Chinatown” in 1974 has sold our city as a realm of dark treachery. And the modern detective novel, with its hungry attraction to sham and decay, more or less was created in and for Los Angeles.

Curious, isn’t it, that this bright, open city grew into the Capitol of darkness. Even more curious is the way it happened. As late as the 1930s Los Angeles still hung onto the untarnished view of itself as the land of sunshine and easy living. Remember old Grampa Joad in “The Grapes of Wrath” who crosses the California border and speaks for a generation of misguided dreamers when he says, “Got a feeling it will make a new fella outta me?” It didn’t, of course. It wore him down and killed him. And soon, the other version of Southern California began to leak out.

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We owe that dark version, really, to one man: Raymond Chandler. He created a metropolis of lies, a city that made promises it didn’t keep, that tricked and cheated people into a bitter old age. Rarely has a city been reinvented by one person, but our city surely was. In the late 1930s Chandler wrote “The Big Sleep” and--though no one realized it at the time--Los Angeles changed forever. Actually, Los Angeles didn’t change. What changed was the picture of L.A. that people carried around in their minds. Chandler had blotted out one truth and imprinted another.

Here’s how he put it in an early book, “The Little Sister”: “I used to like this town. A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the inter-urban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peaceful. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t a neon-lighted slum either.”

Many of the smaller ideas about Los Angeles, ones that we walk around with daily, grew out of Chandler’s books. Take, for example, the Santa Anas. He did not invent the hot, dry winds but he invented the way we think about them. Here’s what he wrote in the short story “Red Wind” in 1938: “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that . . . meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”

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Interestingly enough, Dashiell Hammett had tried the same thing up in San Francisco. And though “The Maltese Falcon” became one of the century’s best detective novels, it did not change anyone’s idea about San Francisco. Nor did later detective novels by myriad authors change the idea about Philadelphia, Chicago or New York. These cities were old, they had a history, and the ideas that defined them had been fixed long ago.

But L.A. was young and ripe for Chandler. Soon he was joined by murder novelists James M. Cain and Ross Macdonald, who helped complete the transformation. “Great cities often get defined by their writers but Los Angeles is the only city that has been defined by detective writers,” said Kenneth Van Dover, editor of the recent “Critical Response to Raymond Chandler.”

“The only other place may be Miami,” he says. “They’re both cities of the American dream and they both have that sense of the blank slate that people can paint their dreams on. Then the dreams don’t come true, and it breeds frustration and violence. That environment, of course, is highly seductive to murder novelists.”

So here we sit in our sun-filled, blood-soaked, Chandler-created city of darkness. Actually, it feels kinda homey, like maybe we’ve got, at long last, the history that we always lacked. It is the history of disguised murder and treachery, of artifice, of gilded malice. A history that glues the city together, that explains things. You want to understand O.J.? The Menendez brothers? Read your Chandler.

Of course, in many ways, it’s a fake history. A product of fiction. But, hey, this is L.A. Real or not, I’ll take it.