Presenting: How To Find Old Los Angeles, a guidebook to the city that was... and still is!

SEPEMBER 2026 NEW EDITION: Ten years ago this month, we welcomed the release of the book-length edition of How to Find Old Los Angeles, our expanded take on Dick Blackburn’s previously published fold-out map, published by the good folks at Herb Lester in London.  It’s been a favorite souvenir for our tour guests ever since, and is now out of print. 

The perfect bound green book had 153 locations (and an index!), but ten years on, the brand new pale pink fold-out version of the guide with art by Heather Cranston-Lesniewski has been distilled to highlight 45 essential spots that we recommend for tourists or locals seeking something a little magical. 

Want a copy for your very own? 

Join us on an Esotouric walking tour and we can bring a copy packed up special with your name on the wrapper. Or just order by mail. You can also find it where fine maps and guidebooks are sold, from Amazon or the bookstore supporting Bookshop site or direct from Herb Lester—where you can supplement your order with some cool postcards.

 

ORIGINAL 2016 ANNOUNCEMENT: I'm pleased to announce the release of How To Find Old Los Angeles, my second title from Herb Lester, the stylish London-based publishers of travel guides and folding maps too pretty to make notes on. Included are 153 historic places that will delight any seeker of cool, old Los Angeles.

Two years ago, I had the great honor to be asked to write the text for Paul Rogers' fold-out

Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles. Like the map and my novel The Kept Girl (also with artwork by Paul Rogers), How To Find Old Los Angeles is available as a souvenir when you join us for an Esotouric bus adventure, or from Esotouric by mail. You can also find it wherever fine paperback books are sold, on Amazon or the bookstore supporting Bookshop site and direct from Herb Lester.

From the introduction: Los Angeles, its critics say, has no more respect for its past than for an empty paper cup. Like most digs aimed at the Big Orange, this simply isn’t true. All across its 503 square miles and 88 municipalities, you can find thriving historic establishments, dishing out chili dogs and cheesecakes, sidecars and self-realization, all with a heaping side of Southern California soul. This book is intended as a pocket guide to worthy pockets of old Los Angeles commerce and culture, from La Puente to La Cienega, Pacific Coast Highway to Hollywood Boulevard. It includes bakeries, bars, bookshops, bowling alleys and many fine things that don't begin with the letter B. Some of these iconic sites are featured on my Esotouric bus tours; others are personal favorites. Each one is a stamp in the informal passport of the true Angeleno.

To get your copy: click here, or join us for a tour.

Celebrating Raymond Chandler's 128th birthday with a noir book and bus tour sale

On July 23, 1888, Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago, a smart, sensitive kid dealt a strange deck that would, in time, make him the great chronicler of the dark side of the California dream.

Join me in celebrating the master's 128th birthday with a week-long sale on noirish things that you can enjoy in person or in the privacy of your own head.

From July 23-29, 2016:

• Take $12.80* off on tickets on Esotouric's July 30 edition of the Raymond Chandler's L.A. bus tour with the discount code redwind
• Take $12.80* off on tickets on Esotouric's The Birth of Noir bus tour on 9/10 with the discount code haytruck
• The Kindle edition of my mystery novel The Kept Girl, starring the young Chandler on the trail of a murderous cult of angel worshippers, is on sale starting at 99¢. Use the discount code gimlet for $5 off the paperback edition. Read Chapter One to get a taste, and see some reviews here. I hope you'll take advantage of the Raymond Chandler birthday sale--and please, tell a noir-loving friend.

* Restrictions: These discount codes expire at midnight, 7/29. Limit four tickets per purchaser, but you may share the codes with friends. This discount can only be used on the tours listed above; if you need to reschedule, you may apply what you paid towards a full-priced ticket on a later regularly scheduled tour date. Discount cannot be combined with any other offer. 

Noir scribes canoodle at the 37th Annual Los Angeles Vintage Paperback Show

It was a packed house at the Glendale Civic Auditorium on April 3 as collectors of pulp fiction, vintage paperbacks, weird art and exploitation converged for the annual Vintage Paperback Show.

Up on the author table,  between signing copies of their books and anthologies, two writers whose beat is the noir side of Los Angeles now (Denise Hamilton) and then (Kim Cooper) shared notes on vintage perfume, bizarre translation errors and and pleasures of the vendor tables.

Put the Vintage Paperback Show on your calendar; it's a blast!

Kept Girl Kept Days book sale - Kindle and Paperback editions

When I plotted The Kept Girl, I chose to set the action over seven sweltering summer days in late August/early September, 1929.

To commemorate the second occurrence of this literary anniversary since publication, the Kindle edition will be deeply discounted on Amazon, starting, just as the book does, on the morning of August 29 at 99 cents and running through September 4, when the Great Eleven cult's secrets are revealed and the price reverts back to $5.99 retail around the witching hour. (UK visitors, click here.)

Not a Kindle user? Save $5 off the paperback in the Esotouric Shop with the discount code "chandlerinlove".

Read Chapter One to get a taste, and see some reviews here. I hope you'll take advantage of the Kept Days Sale--and please, tell a book-loving friend.

A Conjurer's Guide to Lost Los Angeles

Bank of Italy lobby, 1923

When writing The Kept Girl, I drew on historic photographs and postcards as source material for many locations that couldn't easily be visited. For the old Red Sandstone Courthouse is long demolished, as is the Goodfellow's Grotto seafood house and the saltwater plunge on the Ventura shore.  

For the scenes set in the 1923 Bank of Italy building, where Raymond Chandler worked as an oil company executive in the Dabney Syndicate, I consulted vintage photos as well as effusive trade journal descriptions of the myriad gorgeous details included in the lobby and offices.

While the building itself survives at the corner of 7th and Olive Streets in Downtown Los Angeles, it has long been in the possession of a landlord who sees historic landmarks not as gems to be polished, but as undervalued assets to be hoarded until the market swings just so. 

And so I could stand on the sidewalk outside the tightly locked hulk, peering up at the elegant marble columns and massive bronze doors -- both with big chunks missing -- trying to ignore the stench of human urine and pigeon guano, imagining how beautiful it all once was. 

But the location of the stairs and the elevators, the sound of footsteps across the double-height lobby, the colors of the polychromed metalwork--these all had to be invented. And that is what I did.

From Chapter Two of The Kept Girl

     At Seventh Street he swung right, through massive columns framing the tall bronze doors of the Bank of Italy. The lobby was cool and dark, suffused with the clean smell of capital. Tellers stood behind wrought iron screens, their edges burnished with gold leaf and flashes of red, green and blue. Above, deep recesses in the wooden ceiling glowed with pigment. The bank was busy, but as if in deference to the chapel-like space, no customer raised his voice above a whisper. 

  A signpost reading LADIES BANKING—MEZZANINE stood near the wide stair. At the back of the room, a stand of four ornate elevators waited to ferry patrons to the business suites above. Tom stepped into the only open one. 

  “Your destination, officer?” The dapper attendant was a cripple, perched on his stool beside the big wheel. He was an old man with youthful skin that rarely saw daylight, and the patient demeanor of one whose journey never varied. 

  “12th floor, Dabney Oil.” 

  If he found anything unusual in a rumpled beat cop asking for a ride to the top, the attendant gave no sign. With two smooth motions he closed the cage and sent the capsule rolling smoothly upward. They passed a moment in discrete silence before Tom was ushered gracefully into a long hall. Each of the wooden office doors led to some division of the Dabney Oil Syndicate; between them glowered portraits of anonymous burghers who’d made their fortunes centuries before, on wheat, slaves, silk or hardwood. The hall was quiet, and he instinctively tried to hush his steps over the rose pink marble path. 

Room 1208 was labeled in crisp golden letters: South Basin Oil Co. / R.T. Chandler—Vice President. Muriel ushered him in before his second rap. Ray looked up from behind his desk with a grin. 

“Tom! Summer morning in Los Angeles is absolutely glorious. Why didn’t anyone tell me? Sit, sit. Muriel, bring tea!”

*  *  *

So how wonderful it was to read in today's Los Angeles Times that the building has finally been sold, to a hotel developer with a track record of bringing neglected old buildings back into the light. It will be a few years yet, but some day, I'll walk right through those magnificent doors and up to the bar, where I'll order a proper gin gimlet, in honor of Mr. Raymond Chandler. 

Cover Girl

Over the holidays, J. Kingston Pierce's The Rap Sheet blog polled its crime fiction-loving readers to name their favorite genre book covers of 2014. It was an fast-moving competition with some fine jackets and more than 1000 votes, and I peeped through my fingers as Paul Rogers' design for The Kept Girl duked it out with Jonathan Pelham's noirish British cover for Benjamin Black's The Black Eyed Blonde. It was a close contest, and in the end, Pelham took the crown, with The Kept Girl at #2. But it was an honor just to be nominated, and the recognition is a real thrill for the first publication of an independent press.

KPCC's "Serial" Season 1 finale and debrief at the Crawford Family Forum

A lively conversation on the complex legal, ethical and journalistic issues raised by the podcast Serial was held on December 18, 2014 at KPCC's Crawford Family Forum, following a communal listen to the final episode of the series. Topics of discussion at the packed event included the discomfort some audience members felt in experiencing the story of a young woman's murder as entertainment, troubling aspects about the legal case against Adnan Syed and the bizarre plea deal offered to Jay Wilds, and the impact of semi-moderated internet sleuthing on the real people impacted by the case.  From left to right are attorney Alan Jackson (Partner with Brown White & Newhouse LLP and former Assistant Head Deputy District Attorney with the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office), attorney Lisa Kang (Alternate Public Defender for Los Angeles County), moderators Kristen Muller (KPCC managing editor of news) and Sanden Totten (science reporter) and crime historian and novelist Kim Cooper (Esotouric /The Kept Girl).