By Melonie Magruder
Lookout Staff

March 8, 2012 -- Seventy-five years after Raymond Chandler immortalized Santa Monica as “Bay City,” it might be hard to find “women who should be young, but have faces like stale beer,” or “ratty hotels where nobody except people named Smith and Jones register."

But you will be able to see and learn about the Santa Monica Chandler haunted and wrote about in his famous noir short stories and novels in “A Walk on Raymond Chandler’s Westside,” an illustrated lecture by author Judith Freeman, to be held at the Annenberg Beach House next week.

Santa Monica Blvd. Photos courtesy of Loren Latker

Freeman, a novelist, teacher and Chandler biographer, will lead a virtual tour of local Chandler residences and neighborhoods prominently featured in Chandler stories as part of Santa Monica Citywide Reads and Noirfest Santa Monica.

“I don’t think anyone wrote about L.A. better than Chandler,” Freeman said. “He was a great mystery writer, but also a great historian.  So his books have endured, and new generations keep discovering him.”

That Chandler wrote of locations and landmarks in a then-contemporary Los Angeles has kept Chandler buffs scrambling to track his stomping grounds.

The ritzy Bellaire Bay Club and Deauville Beach Clubs along Pacific Coast Highway were mentioned in his works. Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café – she of the Marx Brothers’ movies and infamously lurid and mysterious death by carbon monoxide poisoning – can still be found on PCH just past Sunset at Castellammare Drive.

Old City Hall, the McDonnell Douglas factory, Adelaide Drive (near Chandler’s old home on San Vicente Boulevard) – all made their way into the mystery writer’s dark subplots.

And then there were the gambling ships.

Casa Del Mar

Though Prohibition was in place, these “floating houses of sin” would anchor just far enough away from the Pier as to be technically in international waters, and operated merrily (Chandler, a gambler and alcoholic, was an enthusiastic patron) till California Attorney General Earl Warren shut them down indefinitely.

“Chandler drew on crimes committed in Santa Monica to feature in his stories,” Freeman said. “He used local people and events that were reported in the newspaper and was fascinated by the systemic corruption in the local police departments. But then, as Phillip Marlowe said, ‘The law was where you bought it.’”

Freeman, whose recent book tells of Chandler’s long and tempestuous marriage with wife Cissy, titled “The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved,” enlisted the help of Nina Fresco at the Santa Monica Conservancy and local Chandler historian Loren Latker to help assemble anecdotes and images for her lecture, many of which can be found in the Public Library.

Latker even thinks he has solved a long speculated mystery of how Chandler came up with the name “Bay City” as a moniker for Santa Monica. Latker found a copy of Los Angeles County’s “Bay Cities Directory” of 1938.

This was a sort of all-purpose register that contained names of businesses and private citizens (including their occupations), a street guide, a numerical phone guide and other details, and covered everyone in Santa Monica, Ocean Park, Venice, West Los Angeles and Brentwood Heights.

Crystal Beach Santa Monica

But since Chandler called Los Angeles “Los Angeles,” why not refer to Santa Monica similarly? Latker suggested that Chandler was not very laudatory of Santa Monica Police Department activities at the time and might have been shielding sources.

Freeman noted that it was in this Directory that Chandler first listed his occupation (a breach of privacy that would be unthinkable today) as a writer.

“Before, in the L.A. phone book, he listed himself as an ‘Oil Company Executive,’" Freeman said, adding that Chandler worked for a while for Dabney Oil Syndicate. “It was while living in Santa Monica, and having already experienced a lot of success, that he truly began to think of himself as a writer.”

Chandler and Cissy did not stay long at 449 Sa

Gambling Ship

n Vicente Blvd. A self-acknowledged “gypsy,” he and his wife changed residences some three dozen times during their life together in Southern California.

“I think Chandler was a restless man who needed new vistas to stimulate his creative processes,” Freeman said. “They had no children, few friends and no real social life. They moved because they could and he thrived on change.”

Freeman said she understood such mercurial nature. When she first moved to Los Angeles, she lived in the MacArthur Park neighborhood where Chandler had lived with his mother and wife, and it inspired her to not only start reading Chandler, but to start exploring the Los Angeles and Santa Monica Chandler knew.

“I vowed that someday I would write about him,” she said. “So my book is as much about this city and its history as it is about a marriage and a writer.”