Friends With A Dead Man
For Bouchercon this year I added an optional excursion -- "Raymond Chandler's La Jolla Tour," led by local mystery author Corey Lynn Fayman. I've read my share of Chandler and with the tour in my backyard -- it's just twenty minutes from my front door to the former Raymond Chandler residence -- it seemed a good way to kick off my conference week.
Corey met our group of about two dozen folks, conducted us onto one of San Diego's ubiquitous tour trolleys, and we were off to spend our day in La Jolla. Corey is a local and was well-versed in beach cities lore, even beyond the life and times of Raymond Chandler, whom he researched for his forthcoming novel.
It was a plesant day in the sun and it was nice to see some of my extended neighborhood without having to do the driving. I've been to La Jolla a time or two and it turns out I'd walked past several of the sites on Corey's tour without recognizing their significance. Partly this is due to one well-preserved home in La Jolla looking much like another, but mostly it's down to there being relatively few traces remaining of Chandler's La Jolla, even though its only been a bit more than sixty years since he passed.
La Jolla has strict building codes and community standards, so its easy to believe the village looks today the way it did when Chandler moved there in the 1950s, seeking a calm climate for his ill wife. But the town has grown significantly since then, and we had to squint to see La Jolla as Chandler would have known it. His neighborhood has filled in, and the house he lived on has had rooms and a second story added by subsequent owners. Other homes he lived in have been replaced entirely. The hotel he and J. Edgar Hoover used to haunt is gone, and his favorite bar was closed (but is soon to reopen).
But Corey brought the place to life with his anecdotes, and La Jolla is a lovely spot to visit even if you aren't stalking Chandler's ghost. A highlight was an old house on Drury Lane which still looks pretty much exactly as Chandler described it in Playback. And I'd just finished The Goodbye Look by Ross Macdonald, which has a scene set in La Jolla Cove (by another name, of course, Macdonald changed the names to protect the guilty), so I felt some tingles from not just one but two of my favorite noir authors.
We concluded the day with a visit to the Chandler gravesite at Mt. Hope Cemetery, and lingering in that place a couple things went through my head. Blessings and thanks, of course, and also, "Who killed the chauffer, Ray?" But I also thought about how even Chandler's tombstone required we squint to see it clearly -- Chandler died without burial instructions, and he only shares this plot and this site with his wife thanks to the work of historians and fans who went through a court process to see Chandler through to this modest conclusion.
On the headstone is a quote from The Big Sleep: "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts," which (as my sons would say) is pretty Metal ... but given his absence of burial instructions, it's a quote that was selected for him. What Chandler might have wanted for himself is as vanished as his footprints around La Jolla.
Having been on this tour and trying to write in the genre he mastered, I feel some parasocial kinship with Raymond Chandler. I know enough about him now that I can wow my friends (bore my sons, actually) with Chandler trivia the next time I'm down in La Jolla. Chandler is alive through his work and I guess it harms no one if I think of him as a friend, though I doubt he'd like me much -- I’m not a drinker, and I can’t see the creator of Phillip Marlowe putting up with that. In his letters, Chandler wrote, "I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it." I don't often get drunk but the next time I do, I'll raise one to Mr. Chandler. In the meantime, I’ll remain snotty.
Thanks to Corey for putting together the tour. In one of his recent newsletters he mentioned he might run his tour again -- email him directly if you are interested.