Perhaps no true-crime story influenced Raymond Chandler more than the alleged murder-suicide of oil scion Ned Doheny and his best friend and private secretary Hugh Plunkett in 1929. The scandalous shooting (and its subsequent coverup, placing all the blame on Plunkett) took place at Greystone. Doheny’s gloomy faux-English manor in Beverly Hills, according to Williams, inspired Ray’s description of both the Sternwood estate in The Big Sleep and the, Grayle home in Farewell, My Lovely.

“The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather gray for California, and probably had fewer windows than the Chrysler Building,” he writes in Farewell, My Lovely.

Ray would also touch on the coverup of the case in The High Window, re-christening it, “the Cassidy case.” In it, Philip Marlowe asks: “Did you ever stop to think… that Cassidy’s secretary might have had a mother or a sister or a sweetheart—or all three? That they had their pride and their faith and their love for a kid who was made out to be a drunken paranoiac because his boss’s father had a hundred million dollars?”

It was in the stylish, clubby home of Caroline and Warren Lloyd at 713 South Bonnie Brae Street that Ray and his domineering mother Florence first lived, when they moved to Los Angeles in 1913. The progressive, elegant, and intellectual Lloyds lived a charmed Southern California life in the posh neighborhood of Westlake, surrounding what is now MacArthur Park. Ray was absorbed by the Lloyds into their circle, known as “The Optimists.” According to Williams: “Every Friday evening, the Lloyds threw the doors of their home open to musicians and intellectuals...Evenings of cocktails and conversation would sometimes end with Warren Lloyd sitting down at a Ouija board.

Year’s later, Ray (though the character of Marlowe) reflected in The Little Sister on what LA was like during the golden age of folks like the Lloyd’s:

“I used to like this town. A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t a neon-lighted slum, either.”

After leaving the Lloyds’ heady home, Ray and his mother settled into the crowded Victorian neighborhood of Bunker Hill, overlooking Downtown LA. Though they lived there only briefly (a pattern the restless Ray would later repeat with his wife Cissy), Ray was struck with the quirky neighborhood and its eventual decline and disappearance. In The High Window (1942), he wrote:

“Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets. They are all rooming houses now, their parquetry floors are scratched and worn through the once glossy finish and the wide sweeping staircases are dark with time and with cheap varnish laid on over generations of dirt. In the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shows into the sun and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles.”

During the heady days of the roaring, boom-time 1920s, Chandler spent many days in the Signal Hill oil fields of the Dabney Oil Company, where he was an executive. In his stories, including The Curtain, he repeatedly uses oil wealth as a metaphor for the dark forgetfulness that came with Los Angeles success:

“Some of the wooden derricks still stood. These had made the wealth of the Winslow family and then the family had run away from them up the hill, far enough to get away from the smell of the sumps, not too far for them to look out of the front windows and see what made them rich.”

And then there is the end of The Big Sleep, where Marlowe realizes his fate in the city that oil and water built:

“What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep…. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now.”

The murder of crime boss Charlie Crawford in his ivy-covered office bungalow on May 20, 1931 titillated all of Los Angeles, including Raymond Chandler. Crawford was part of the City Hall-underground crime loop that Ray would fictionalize as the nefarious “The Syndicate” in his novels. What made Crawford’s murder all the more shocking—Dave Clark, a corrupt district attorney, was charged with his murder. On the site of the bungalow, Crawford’s wife Ella would build Crossroads of the World, the Streamline-Moderne office complex that became an LA landmark.

In 1933, Raymond and Cissy moved into this small stucco home in the hills of the modernist, bohemian neighborhood of Silver Lake. Recently fired from his job as an oil executive, Ray was strapped for cash, trying his hand at mystery writing. But it was a happy, nesting period for the peculiarly particular couple, who were “better than we ever were before,” according to Ray, enjoying “good air and a view of the mountains.” While living here, the Chandlers brought home their beloved black Persian cat Taki, who they would spoil for the next 20 years. The home still stands to this day.

This manmade reservoir makes an appearance as Gray Lake in Ray’s 1934 short-story Finger Man. He describes the LA landmark thusly:

“Gray Lake is an artificial reservoir in a cut between two groups of hills, on the east fringe of San Angelo. Narrow but expensively paved streets wind around in the hills, describing elaborate curves along their flanks for the benefit of a few cheap and scattered bungalows. We plunged up into the hills, reading street signs on the run. The gray silk of the lake dropped away from us and the exhaust of the old Marmon roared between crumbling banks that shed dirt down on the unused sidewalks.”

After the success of his early novels, Ray was tapped to adapt James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity with writer/director Billy Wilder. The two men loathed each other, and the scenes inside their cramped Paramount office were tense. According to Wilder, Ray wrote a letter of complaint about him that he never forgot:

“He couldn’t work with me any more because I was rude; I was drinking; I was fucking; I was on the phone with four broads, with one I was on the phone—he clocked me—for twelve and a half minutes; I had asked him to pull down the Venetian blinds—the sun was streaming into the office—without saying please.”

However, after the movie’s success Ray settled into life on the Paramount lot, where one co-worker observed, “he loved interruptions more than anything else.” He also loved drinking, and burned bridges at the studio when he presented a list of demands in exchange for finishing the script for The Blue Dahlia. Unless he could write at home and drunk, he claimed, it would never get done in time. According to Williams, his full demands included;

A. Two Cadillac limousines, to stand day and night outside the house with drivers available for:

1. Fetching the doctor (Ray’s or Cissy’s or both).

2. Taking script pages to and from the studio.

3. Driving the maid to the market.

4. Contingencies and emergencies.

B. Six secretaries—in three relays of two—to be in constant attendance and

readiness, available at all times for dictation, typing, and other possible emergencies.

The studio agreed to Ray’s demands, and the script was finished in record time.

After his tumultuous time at Paramount, Ray went to MGM to work on a screen adaptation of Lady in the Lake. Assigned to an antiseptic office in the Art Deco-style Thalberg building, Ray proved difficult and maddening. He hated the Thalberg building, which he referred to as “that cold storage plant.” He found the writers distant and formal, and he didn’t like their traditional way of doing things. According Williams;

“MGM was not what it had been at Paramount. There, he had been able to work in his office, sitting or lying on a sofa and dictating into a machine, but sofas were frowned on by MGM executives who thought that a writer lying on his back was not writing but sleeping. Ray, who was now used to getting his own way, brought out a rug from his car and lay on that instead. When his producer paid a

visit to the office and found his star writer lying on a picnic blanket, he immediately called down to the story editor and, according to Ray, ‘shouted that I was a horizontal writer and for Chrissake send up a couch.’”

Completed in 1924, this sleek modern tunnel running under Downtown LA was famous from day one due to the reflective white tiles that line its interior. Ray was clearly inspired by the tunnel, and turned it into a symbol of efficient violence in The Big Sleep:

“The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel, but I didn’t move.”

Ray and Cissy would frequently spend long stretches of summer at this rustic resort town, a place to recuperate and relax and meditatively chop wood. “I went up to Big Bear Lake to get over a case of complete exhaustion such as you will never know, you dynamo,” Ray wrote to a friend in the mid-’40s. “I’d done a script for MGM in 13 weeks and hated every bit of it, especially as it was one of my own stories. I was completely sunk. The only thing I could read was the Perry Mason stories.”

In stories including the short story No Crime in the Mountains and the novel The Lady in the Lake,  Big Bear is transformed to the romanticized mountain town of Puma Point.

This bustling, vibrant street—the heartbeat of black LA—is central to the action in short stories including Pick-Up on Noon Street, as well as the novel Farewell, My Lovely. Scenes on Central Avenue and in its legendary bars are some of the most problematic in Raymond Chandler’s canon, as William’s explains:

“Noon Street Nemesis (now generally published under the title Pick-Up on Noon Street) is an uncomfortable story for modern readers because it is set around Central Avenue, Los Angeles, home to the city’s black population, and the language Ray uses is clearly offensive. Black characters are invariably referred to as ‘the negro’ while the heroic protagonist is called Pete Anglich, a name which seems to deliberately evoke Anglo-Saxon whiteness.”

Ray would spend many a night (and day) drinking in the legendary “back bar” of this Hollywood institution, along with other literary lushes like Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He mentions Musso’s in The Long Goodbye, and it is said that the nearby Stanley Rose Bookshop was the inspiration for the rare books store (really a front for criminal enterprises) in The Big Sleep.

Detectives need libraries too! In The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe searches for facts in the age before Google:

“I went over to the Hollywood Public Library and asked questions in the reference room, but couldn’t find what I wanted. So I had to go back for my Olds and drive downtown to the Main Library. I found it there, in a smallish red-bound book published in England. I copied what I wanted from it and drove home.”

In Farewell, My Lovely, Santa Monica is transformed into Bay City, the corrupt seaside small town at the heart of the story. Marlowe describes the Santa Monica City Hall with his customarily critical eye:

“It was a cheap-looking building for so prosperous a town. It looked more like something out of the Bible Belt. Bums sat unmolested in a long row on the retaining wall that kept the front lawn—now mostly Bermuda grass—from falling into the street... The cracked walk and the front steps led to open double doors in which a knot of obvious City Hall fixers hung around waiting for something to happen so they could make something else out of it. They all had well-fed stomachs, the careful eyes, the nice clothes and the reach-me-down manners. They gave me about four inches to get by.”