Cities have characters, pathologies that can make or destroy or infect you, states of mind that run through daily life as surely as a fault line. Chandler’s “mysterious something” was a mood of disenchantment, an intense spiritual malaise that identified itself with Los Angeles at a particular time, what we call noir. On the one hand noir is a narrow film genre, born in Hollywood in the late 1930s when a European visual style, the twisted perspectives and stark chiaroscuros of German Expressionism, met an American literary idiom. This fruitful comingling gave birth to movies like Double Indemnity, directed by Vienna-born Billy Wilder and scripted by Raymond Chandler from a James M. Cain novella. The themes—murderous sex and the cool, intricate amorality of money—rose directly from the psychic mulch of Southern California. But L.A. is a city of big dreams and cruelly inevitable disappointments where noir is more than just a slice of cinema history; it’s a counter-tradition, the dark lens through which the booster myths came to be viewed, a disillusion that shadows even the best of times, an alienation that assails the senses like the harsh glitter of mica in the sidewalk on a pitiless Santa Ana day. Noir—in this sense a perspective on history and often a substitute for it—was born when the Roaring Twenties blew themselves out and hard times rushed in; it crystallized real-life events and the writhing collapse of the national economy before finding its interpreters in writers like Raymond Chandler.

"America politics is an arm of business and the aim of business is to make money without care for the law, because politics, controlled by business, can change or buy the law. Politics is interested in profit, not municipal prosperity or civic pride. The spirit of graft and lawlessness is the American spirit.” Each of the cities that Steffens researched was governed by an open alliance with crime, and at the center of that alliance always stood a “boss,” “easier to deal with than the people’s representatives,” a manipulator connecting crime, business, and politics."

With a history of insanity in her family, Bow feared that she’d end up in the madhouse. Maybe all she needed was a rest. After a visit to New York, where she hobnobbed with boxer Jack Dempsey, socialite Jack Whitney, and gangster Dutch Schultz, she announced that she was returning to L.A. because she wanted to have her nervous breakdown “in the proper surroundings.” The girl from the slums had wit.

Marlowe lived in a beautiful world that had gone wrong, a paradise that would never be restored and in whose existence he had long since ceased to believe. He lived in Los Angeles."