"A Fight L.A. Has Picked and Won for 150 Years"

"Climate was what L.A. sold, and really, for years, that's all it had to sell. Far into the 19th century, L.A. was a scruffy village of dust and mayhem—but just look up, the new Angelenos insisted. Look at our fine mountains, breathe our air, fragrant (eventually) with citrus blossoms. Look at us—in shirtsleeves, in the winter!"

In the Los Angeles Times, Patt Morrison writes that Los Angeles "made its first fortune by selling winter."

"He Created the Hard-Drinking, Self-Deprecating Antihero in His Own Image"

"Where did Chandler come by the wry worldview that would become synonymous with Los Angeles noir? Mr. Day lets his subject answer that question in his own words by stringing together hundreds of excerpts from the author's correspondence, fiction and screenplays. He stretches Chandler's limber language like a skein across the skeleton of his life, knitting in the spaces in between with his own editorial commentary. The book follows a loose chronology, with the quotations Mr. Day has connected reading at times like an expanded Chandler section in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations."


Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times reviews Barry Day's The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words.