In Philip Marlowe’s Footsteps: A Raymond Chandler Tour of Los Angeles

The house was on Dresden Avenue in the Oak Noll section of Pasadena, a big solid cool-looking house with burgundy brick walls, a terra cotta tile roof, and a white stone trim.

The house you see here isn't burgundy brick, but then again, there isn't a Dresden Avenue in the Oak Knoll (it's spelled with a "k", Mr. Chandler) section of Pasadena.  But the houses here are big, solid, and cool-looking, and when I went looking recently for a house that could have belonged to Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock, the crafty battleaxe with something to hide in Raymond Chandler's novel The High Window , this one fit the bill.

I was on a Chandler location hunt in and around Los Angeles, and The High Window was the book I'd chosen as the source for the coordinates on my map.  Less well-known than Farewell My Lovely or The Big Sleep , The High Window  is nevertheless populated with the master's usual gallery of people you'd as soon not meet in real life:  the battleaxe, the useless leech of a son, the tough broads, the mobster night club owner ... and, of course, the man you wouldn't mind meeting at all if you were in a tight spot, private detective Philip Marlowe.

I've always found it interesting that  two of the greatest practitioners of the most plot-dependent of all literary genres excelled just as much at setting as at plot.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of course, limned late Victorian London so exquisitely that you feel as if you could go there and hail a hansom cab.  And Raymond Chandler is the other genius of setting, portraying the Los Angeles of the Thirties and Forties every bit as convincingly as he portrayed his knight-errant Marlowe. 

As my friend the literary scholar Harry Orth recently observed, Chandler pulled an even neater trick than Conan Doyle.  He points out that while the London of Sherlock Holmes, with its damps and fogs and perpetually crepuscular atmosphere, looked  like a place where half the population was up to no good, it was harder to summon up that much malevolence out of sunny LA.   But summon it Chandler did.  It might seem as if noir fiction ought to all happen at night, but that's because directors seldom shot noir  movies in broad daylight.  In Chandler's novels and stories, plenty of creeps crawl out from under their rocks when the sun is shining.

I started my search for places that figure in The High Window  in Hollywood, where Marlowe himself had his office.  That I couldn't find; his building, like his apartment, are on fictitious streets.  But I did track down the block where George Anson Phillips, the hapless shamus whom Marlowe confronts after Phillips has been clumsily shadowing him, has his office, at 1924 North Wilcox Avenue.