L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

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OTHER CITIES have histories. Los Angeles has legends. Advertised to the world as the Eden at the end of the western frontier, the settlement the Spaniards named El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles turned out to be something very different—not the beatific Our Lady the Queen of the Angels advertised by its name but rather a dark, dangerous blonde.

She got up slowly and swayed towards me in a tight black dress that didn’t reflect any light. She had long thighs and she walked with a certain something I hadn’t often seen in bookstores. She was an ash blonde…

Her smile was tentative, but could be persuaded to be nice.

—Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

For more than sixty years, writers and directors from Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder to Roman Polanski and James Ellroy have explored L.A.’s origins, its underbelly, and (yes) its blondes in fiction and films like The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Chinatown, and L.A. Confidential. In the process, they created the distinctive worldview known as noir, where honor is in short supply and where Los Angeles invariably proves to be a femme fatale. Yet this preoccupation with a mythic past has obscured something important—the true history of noir Los Angeles.

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