Esotouric™

We now offer two Raymond Chandler tours, which divide neatly at La Cienega Blvd. into East and West Los Angeles. In A Lonely Place, focuses on downtown and Hollywood, settings and scenes from his life and novels to his work in motion pictures which sent him in a tail spin from which he would never recover. The Bay City tour is a look at his middle novels (Farewell My Lovely, Lady In the Lake) and short stories including "Bay City Blues" and how the Westside shaped his both fiction and life. These tours are complementary. Each exists independently, and do not presuppose a knowledge of the other, but taken as a whole they provide a deep and rich portrait of a giant in American Letters and early contributor to the myth which we have all come to know as Los Angeles.

In A Lonely Place: Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles

Chandler’s Bay City

Introducing Chandler's Bay City: Crook town, run down, shabby town, gambling town. Novelist Raymond Chandler gravitated to sin and debauch, so Santa Monica in the 1930s was a frequent stop for Philip Marlowe. From doctors feelgood to second wives with pasts to crooked cops with a loathing for a mouthy PI, this tour has it all. Chandler's canonization of sin, wealth and sunshine on L.A.'s Westside fed the abiding myths of the American hard-boiled genre and play into the popular conception of the region.

Focusing on Chandler's middle period – "Farewell My Lovely," "Lady in the Lake" and a few short stories upon which these novels are built, "Bay City Blues" among them-- this tour will explore Chandler's take on the Westside, the real life rackets and murders which gave Bay City its wild reputation, and the elements of the old community that have survived layer upon layer of gentrification.

As the bus rolls from point to point, your guides will draw the lines between Chandler's life and his fiction, offering insight into his nomadic life with wife Cissy, the enigmatic redhead who appears in many forms in his short stories and novels.

Locations for the tour include:

The ruins of Pickfair (Mary Pickford's former beach house, and close to the launch for the gambling ships)

Site of the former Santa Monica City Hall (4th & Santa Monica) immortalized in "Farewell My Lovely."

Former site of Thelma Todd's sidewalk cafe (just West of Sunset on the PCH), inspiration for the Lindsay Marriot House in "Farewell My Lovely."

Santa Monica and Brentwood residences for Ray & Cissy.

Books & Short Stories covered in the tour:

Farewell My Lovely
Bay City Blues
Lady in the Lake
Red Wind
The Little Sister

Click here for info on a special edition of our popular Chandler tour, exclusively for Vroman's Bookstore customers and departing from their Pasadena store.

Southern California 1931: Amongst the burgeoning urban sprawl built atop bulldozed orange groves and the bitter realization that you can’t eat the sunshine, recent emigré James M. Cain found a kernel of truth and his voice, which would eventually distill through his novels, ”The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Mildred Pierce” and “Double Indemnity” and subsequent film adaptations into the unique American genre: Film Noir.

How did this East Coat sophisticate go from managing editor of “The New Yorker” to populist novelist accused of writing dirty books? The tour explores Cain’s L.A. from Hollywood to Glendale and along old Route 66, and includes illuminating visits to Forest Lawn Memorial Park (a Glendale institution and site of the funeral of Mildred Pierce’s “other” daughter, Ray), the Glendale Train Station where the “Double Indemnity” murder plot played out, and the punch line to a Billy Wilder joke so subtle, it’s taken 63 years for anyone to get. The tour will also cover the artisans who transformed Cain’s tales into film, including Billy Wilder, Raymond Chandler, Joan Crawford and Lana Turner, each an important contributor to the Film Noir canon.

This tour focuses on Bukowski’s great passions: writing, screwing and Los Angeles. We’ll take in the canonical locations of his life and myth: the Postal Annex Terminal where he gathered the material for “Post Office,” the De Longpre apartment where he briefly experimented with marriage and fatherhood, one of his favorite bars and liquor stores, and many other spots. Along the way, we’ll explore the people and ideas that made up the warp and weft of Buk’s rich inner life. This Esotouric bus adventure is hosted by Richard Schave.

Episode 105 from Ryder Palmere’s show, Your Dog’s Breakfast features the Bukowski tour, as well as this short film on the landmarking of Bukowski’s former bungalow on De Longpre.

"Haunts of a Dirty Old Man: Charles Bukowski's LA" spans Bukowski's personal city, from Skid Row to once-genteel Crown Hill, to Bukowski's favorite East Hollywood liquor store, the Pink Elephant.

Esotouric has made its name with true crime bus tours (Black Dahlia, Pasadena Confidential) and explorations of literary LA (Raymond Chandler, John Fante, James M. Cain). Now they turn their creative attentions to Bukowski, the prolific poet, novelist and screenwriter whose rough-hewn tales of boozing, wild women and rotten jobs never obscure the deep vein of sweetness and hope that runs through all his work. In one of his finest poems, he described this as a bluebird he kept caged, and that bluebird is been represented in the Bukbird, Esotouric's new logo by cartoonist Tony Millionaire, a pale blue version of his beloved alcoholic crow character.

Before Kerouac, before Bukowski, there was John Fante, author of "Ask the Dust," "Dreams of Bunker Hill," "Full of Life," "The Road to Los Angeles" and "Wait Until Spring, Bandini." This five-novel cycle, written over sixty years, introduced the world to Arturo Bandini, an outspoken, down-and-out Mr. Hyde to Fante's Dr. Jekyll.

As Bunker Hill's prodigal son, Fante-as-Bandini chronicles a forgotten Los Angeles neighborhood teeming with immigrants, criminals and dreamers like himself. With genuine compassion and wonderful craft, he sketches the hopes and dreams which fly round their heads, and in the process finds his own voice, a revelation which carries him all the way to Hollywood. Once there, he is distracted by fame and fortune, and settles for easy answers to the questions of faith in oneself, the nature of inspiration, and the duality of failure and redemption. "Dreams of Bunker Hill" was dictated by a blind Fante two years before his death, and "Road to Los Angeles" was published posthumously.

Bunker Hill is gone now, flattened, its mansions torn down, long since redeveloped by corporate and civic interests. But in today's downtown communities the same stories play out, in thriving micro-climates where artists and writers find their voices, where some are making it big and others breaking up on the reef, some moving away and others coming back in search of what they have lost.

Arturo Bandini is alive and well, and his lament is as relevant today as it was 75 years ago. So please join us as we follow in his footsteps, to the Goodwill store, King Eddy's, Clifton's Cafeteria ("pay what you can"), the Los Angeles Library's Reading Room and the Post Office Terminal Annex (important landmarks for Bukowski and Fante), and other evocative scenes of old L.A.

This tour is a meditation not only on John Fante, but the preservation of Public Space. The depopulation of Bunker Hill in the early 1960s became the benchmark for Community Redevelopment across the country-the term "Federal Bulldozer" came out of the many lawsuits filed against the city at the time. And now that corporate interests have decided it is time to repopulate western downtown Los Angeles with market-rate housing the ensuing catastrophe has spawned many new monikers (elegant density is one of the more polite ones) and problems. Public Space downtown can be saved and Arturo Bandini can lead the way.

Please Note: This tour will have several sections which involve walking through parts of Downtown for up to ten minutes at a time. There is one hill-we will walk down the stairs alongside Angels Flight from the top of California Plaza, and the pace of all our strolls will be ambling. Walking shoes and sunscreen are advised.

Bungalows. Crime. Hollywood. Blondes. Vets. Smog. Death.

This was Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, which resonated from deft and melancholy fits of his writer’s bow.

Join us as we go down the mean streets that shaped his fiction, and that in turn shaped his hard-boiled times, in a four hour tour of downtown, Hollywood and surrounding environs: The Los Angeles Athletic Club, Musso & Frank, the Hotel Van Nuys, Paramount Studio’s gates, and much, much more, including a Chandler-themed gelato stop at East Hollywood cult favorite Scoops.

Through published work, private correspondence, screenplays and film adaptations, we trace Chandler’s search for meaning and his anti-hero Philip Marlowe’s struggle to not be pigeonholed or give anything less than all he has, which lead them both down the rabbit hole of isolation, depression, and drink.