On the subject of noirish music: when I'm reading LA based
noir, I like to put Charlie Haden's Haunted Heart on the box.
The cd kicks off with the Warner Brothers Logo Fanfare and
goes on from there, with titles like
"Hello, My Lovely", "The Long Goodbye," "Lady in the Lake,"
and "The Bad and the Beautiful." Also includes vocals by Jo
Stafford, Teri Southern, and Billie Holiday. Beautiful and
essential.
Regarding Chandler's Los Angeles, novelist/screenwriter Leigh
Brackett once commented: "The Los Angeles Chandler wrote
about was long gone; in a sense it never really existed
outside of his imagination."
Commenting on this, in an essay I did on Chandler for Your
Flesh magazine, I wrote the following:
"She might be right. L.A. might never have been a city of
felt fedoras, shiny coupes, smoky, deco nightclubs inhabited
by glittery, whiskey-throated women and pinstriped gangsters.
But, like John Ford's West, Chandler's L.A. is one artist's
vision of how he would have liked things to have been. It's a
testament to the power of that vision that, like Ford's West,
Chandler's Los Angeles has, in effect, become our
reality."
George Pelecanos
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