Thought I'd be all over this book...it's about LA at roughly the same period as I'm working on in my next project. But there's something about the tone or the storyline or the way Chandler has him women behaving like children--even so far as sucking their thumbs--that left a strange residue for me.
But still plenty to steal--from the descriptions of opulence (a la Greystone mansion, where I went to summer camp as a small child) to details about the sounds of daily life (didn't know that traffic lights "gonged"), I'll be grabbing more from Chandler's setting than his narrative. In any case, a classic that I wouldn't feel right writing about LA without having read.
