“The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words” talk, book signing and walking tour
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LAVA – The Los Angeles Visionaries Association and The Larry Edmunds Bookshop invite you to join Barry Day for a celebration of his new book, The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words (Random House). Space is extremely limited and reservations required for this free event.
Barry Day will give a short illustrated talk about Raymond Chandler and his new book, answer questions and sign books.
Immediately following the signing, LAVA co-founders and Raymond Chandler historians Richard Schave (host of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles: In A Lonely Place) & Kim Cooper (author of The Kept Girl and The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles) will lead a free hour-long walking tour of Chandler’s downtown, ending at the King Eddy Saloon with a tour of the genuine prohibition speakeasy in its basement. Locations will include the Oviatt Building (called The Treolar Building in The Lady in the Lake), the Barclay Hotel (site of an icepick murder in The Little Sister), and numerous points of interest along the way. Please note that the walking tour will not return to its starting point, but it will be a short walk back at each guest’s leisure.
ABOUT BARRY DAY: Barry Day is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and a trustee of the Noël Coward Foundation. In addition to his seven previous books on Noël Coward, he has written about Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, Johnny Mercer, and Rodgers & Hart. Day was awarded the OBE (Order of the British Empire) “for services to British culture in the United States.”
ABOUT THE NEW BOOK: Raymond Chandler never wrote a memoir or autobiography. The closest he came to writing either was in—and around—his novels, shorts stories, and letters. There have been books that describe and evaluate Chandler’s life, but to find out what he himself felt about his life and work, Barry Day, editor of The Letters of Noël Coward (“There is much to dazzle here in just the way we expect… the book is meticulous, artfully structured—splendid” —Daniel Mendelsohn; The New York Review of Books), has cannily, deftly chosen from Chandler’s writing, as well as the many interviews he gave over the years as he achieved cult status, to weave together an illuminating narrative that reveals the man, the work, the worlds he created. Using Chandler’s own words as well as Day’s text, here is the life of “the man with no home,” a man precariously balanced between his classical English education with its immutable values and that of a fast-evolving America during the years before the Great War, and the changing vernacular of the cultural psyche that resulted. Chandler makes clear what it is to be a writer, and in particular what it is to be a writer of “hardboiled” fiction in what was for him “another language.” Along the way, he discusses the work of his contemporaries: Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, W. Somerset Maugham, and others (“I wish,” said Chandler, “I had one of those facile plotting brains, like Erle Gardner”).
