Bullocks Wilshire, photo credit: Catherine Corman

Catherine Corman’s October 31 release Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City takes readers on a black and white tour of fictional private eye Philip Marlowe’s real world haunts. As Jonathan Lethem says in his intro the book,

“If architecture is fate, then it is Marlowe’s fate to enumerate the pensive dooms of Los Angeles, the fatal, gorgeous pretenses of glamour and ease, the bogus histories reenacted in the dumb, paste-and-spangles cocktail of style. Remove the dead bodies, and the living ones, as Catherine Corman has done in her own supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places, and the force of Chandler’s insight becomes even more terrifyingly urgent: these streets and buildings we have erected in order to give order to our solitudes, to keep them from being piled unbearably atop one another, they are actively trying to forget us.”

More images after the jump.

Cal Western Aircraft, photo credit: Catherine Corman

Musso and Frank Grill, photo credit: Catherine Corman

Geiger Rare Books, photo credit: Catherine Corman

Rossmore Arms, photo credit: Catherine Corman