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Erschienen in:
2021 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel
12. Los Angeles as a No Man’s Land: First World War Trauma in Raymond Chandler’s Detective Fiction
verfasst von : Sarah Trott
Erschienen in: Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination
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Abstract
In the work of American hard-boiled crime writer Raymond Chandler the city of Los Angeles is portrayed as a corrupt and decaying environment that consistently thwarts the protagonist’s efforts to find justice and closure. As a veteran of the First World War, Chandler imbues his detective protagonist Philip Marlowe with a profound level of disillusionment in the face of an apparently meaningless and combative post-war world. Drawing upon Chandler’s veteran status, this essay argues that Marlowe’s disillusionment towards society, and the city specifically, is suggestive of the author’s vision of Los Angeles as a hostile post-war No Man’s Land; a physical and psychological battleground relocated from the trenches of Europe to urban California. It is a location where human existence, time, space, and emotion have been eroded beyond the detective’s comprehension, and the only escape is to retreat to the pastoral areas outside of the corrosive urban environment.