The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles: A Guide to the Usual and Unusual

Few writers are as inextricably linked with a city as Raymond Chandler and Los Angeles. The neon-lit streets, mobbed-up joints and seedy rooming houses portrayed in his fiction were real places, familiar to Angelenos of the time, and in some cases recognisable today.

This is a guide to the world of Raymond Chandler and his noble alter-ego, the private detective Philip Marlowe. It mixes locations from the books, the films and Chandler's personal life. There's the crummy dive where Moose Malloy went looking for Velma; the actual lounge where Marlowe and Terry Lennox ordered gimlets; the top-floor suite where oil executive Chandler got his priceless education in how a dirty, sun-drenched city really operated. This is the Los Angeles that Raymond Chandler carried in his heart. And now, you can too.

Crime historian and novelist Kim Cooper is co-creator and co-host of the Esotouric bus tours Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, The Birth of Noir and The Real Black Dahlia. Her novel "The Kept Girl" follows the young Raymond Chandler on the trail of a real-life cult of angel worshippers in 1920s Southern California. When the third generation Angeleno isn't combing old newspapers for forgotten scandals, she is a passionate advocate for historic preservation of signage, vernacular architecture and writer's homes. Kim was for many years the editrix of Scram, a journal of unpopular culture. Her books include "How To Find Old Los Angeles," "Fall in Love For Life: Inspiration from a 73-Year Marriage," "Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth," "Lost in the Grooves," and an oral history of Neutral Milk Hotel.