Holiday gifts... on the noir side

Stumped for what to give the true crime and mystery lover in your life?

Perhaps a personalized, autographed copy of The Kept Girl, Kim Cooper's critically-acclaimed novel of 1929 Los Angeles featuring the young Raymond Chandler on the trail of a cult of murderous angel worshippers, would fit the bill. The book is just $14.99 (plus shipping + tax, where applicable), or $24.99 for the deluxe edition in silver-foiled Art Deco wraps.

There's also The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles, which is the perfect size to slip into a stocking or into a holiday card envelope, and which author Kim Cooper can inscribe on request. The map is $10 postpaid in the US, $14 elsewhere.

And for those visiting or lucky enough to live in Los Angeles, there's a seasonal sale on gift certificates for Esotouric's award-winning bus adventures, each of them hosted or co-hosted by author Kim Cooper.

To order your holiday gifts and ensure quick shipment before the holidays, just make a list of what you'd like, and email to reserve.  

Raymond Chandler's Secret

When I hopped the fence from true crime to historical fiction, I couldn't anticipate that my background research would uncover a completely unknown musical comedy libretto by Raymond Chandler that shatters the familiar narratives of his late-life literary career and legendary marriage. But I am so, so grateful that it did.

In The Guardian, Sarah Weinman shares the story of my discovery of the comic operetta The Princess and the Pedlar, and why the Chandler Estate would rather you didn't know about it. If you'd like to help me stage this remarkable show in Los Angeles, please click here.

In memory of Bob Baker

Farewell to my brilliant, sweet friend Bob Baker, master puppeteer, native son, educator, enthusiast. With him goes so much knowledge of L.A. lore!

I'll treasure the memory of our last visit, when I read to him from the first chapter of my novel. He said he thought I'd succeeded in capturing the feeling of the 1929 Los Angeles he remembered, and I replied that talking with him over the years had helped. 

Strings down, now. No funeral--only joy in his memory. Go do something daring and delightful, with a twinkle in your eye.    

Debuting the Book Trailer for "The Kept Girl"

Now you don't have to be a passenger on one of Esotouric's Los Angeles bus adventures to enjoy author Kim Cooper's lilting tones on this short video trailer that introduces the real-life cast of characters that people her debut mystery, The Kept Girl. 

Bruckman Rare Book Friends talk at Los Angeles Public Library

The Bruckman Rare Book Friends invited Kim Cooper and her husband Richard Schave to speak on November 2, 2014 at the Central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. After presenting an inscribed copy of the deluxe first edition of her novel The Kept Girl to the library's Rare Books Department, Kim shared the weird story of the Great Eleven cult's activities, and how her research into Raymond Chandler's life and work revealed a way to fictionalize this notorious true crime narrative. Then Richard discussed the digital tools he used to design the 1940s pulp-style paperback and decorative wraps for the deluxe edition. As a bonus, architectural historian Nathan Marsak made a surprise appearance, assisting Richard with an overview the demolished Victorian neighborhood of Bunker Hill.

Photo: John Okanishi  

Sisters in Crime discuss Noir Fiction at Burbank's Buena Vista Branch Library

A panel on noir fiction featuring members of the Los Angeles branch of Sisters in Crime was held on October 8, 2014 at Burbank's Buena Vista Branch Library. Topics of discussion included the importance of tiny filler newspaper stories in inspiring fictional plots, whether contemporary writing can truly be noir, and the topics too grim for even the hardest-boiled fiction.  From left to right are moderator Craig Faustus Buck (Psycho Logic)  and mystery scribes Gary Phillips (The Essex Man: 10 Seconds to Death),  Kim Cooper (The Kept Girl) and Christopher J. Lynch (One Eyed Jack).

Meet Thomas H. James, a likely model for Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe

When J. Kingston Pierce was writing about The Kept Girl for Kirkus, he conducted a lengthy email interview with author Kim Cooper about the source material and inspirations behind the book.

Once the Kirkus feature was posted, the interview appeared on The Rap Sheet blog.

The section below focuses on Kim's discovery of Thomas H. James as a likely model for the Philip Marlowe character.

With the exception of Thomas H. James' photograph, these images from his pamphlet Chief Steckel Unmasked (1931) have never before been seen online.

JKP: You allude in the Acknowledgements section of your novel to a “scarce self-published pamphlet,” 1931’s Chief Steckel Unmasked, by investigator Thomas H. James, which you suggest “showed him to be a very likely model for Chandler’s white knight detective, Philip Marlowe …” How did James’ pamphlet convince you of that investigator’s influence on Chandler? Did the two men know one other?


KC: When my old ’zine world pal Lynn Peril--that’s her on the cover of RE/Search’s Zines! Vol.1--gifted me with Chief Steckel Unmasked, I immediately turned to ProQuest to see what the L.A. Times had to say about the interesting fellow who had written and self-published it.

It turns out Thomas H. James … was famous for preaching civic reform from his LAPD beat at Seventh and Broadway--the same intersection where, a few years later, the “Cafeteria Kid,” Clifford Clinton, would effect the recall of corrupt L.A. Mayor Frank Shaw.

[James] was perhaps more famous for his flamboyant attention to service while helping people cross the street, being featured in a Los Angeles Times column by Ben S. Lemmon about the lively intersection that ran in April 1929. James would be reassigned to the deep San Fernando Valley, then fired in 1931 for bad-mouthing the mayor and police chief to a couple of undercover investigators. His pamphlet followed this sting operation.

Chandler’s office was two blocks to the west of Seventh and Broadway. Did they know each other? Know of each other? Circumstantial evidence suggests they easily could have. At the time, of course, James was much more famous than Chandler.

Thomas James was the first person who suggested the possibility of a “real-life Philip Marlowe.” My husband, Richard, has since built a list of such characters, including [homicide detective] Aldo Corsini and George Contreras [once an investigator with the L.A. district attorney’s office]. They’re tarnished and conflicted men, but fascinating ones, and in researching their careers we’ve learned a lot about the very odd ways in which the police, vice, and politics intersected in Prohibition-era Los Angeles.

The longer we looked into Chandler, the more winking tributes to real people we found in his writing. I’m particularly proud of sleuthing out the source of the name “Treloar Building” from The Lady in the Lake [1943], a nod to the athletic director at the Los Angeles Athletic Club. He sets murders in real buildings and builds entire plots around real crimes. Why shouldn’t Philip Marlowe be a real person, or a composite of several?

Finally, there’s the little matter of Chandler’s [1935] short story “Spanish Blood,” which is based on David Clark’s notorious shooting of gambling boss Charlie Crawford and Herbert Spencer in May 1931. Spencer published a muckraking political magazine with which Thomas James may have had an affiliation. Clark worked for the D.A.’s office, and had prosecuted Albert Marco in the [1928] Ship Café shooting. The backlash from the Marco case was what led to Thomas James’ removal from the [L.A.] Police Commission investigator’s roll and his demotion to beat cop. At Clark’s trial, James testified that Clark had asked him to intercede with Spencer on behalf of gambling boss Guy McAfee, who supported Clark’s political ambitions. James later sent a letter to the Los Angeles Times, thanking them for not smearing Spencer posthumously, as other papers had.

The connections are there, and they run deep.

JKP: What did James go on to do later in his life, post-1920s?

KC: After fighting for and winning the right to return to police work, James retired early and got back into journalism, publishing a trade magazine for police officers. He married a society woman who shared his prohibitionist interests, and was living in a very nice house in Glendale at the time of his premature death in 1949.

JKP: Wait, what do you mean James “got back into journalism”? Did he work as a journalist before signing on with the L.A. force?

KC: I consider his self-published pamphlet to be journalism, but there is also a strong probability that Tom James clandestinely provided information to the muckraking journal The Critic of Critics before he was drummed out of the force.