The City of Angels was like the cities of men wherever you find them. Crime and folly required that some men be authorized to wield power over other men. But it was dangerous to invest the authorities with all the power that must be wielded and, besides, you must be careful not to taint them with the wielding. So irregular means of seeking justice would always be needed. Justice may be out there, but it was no easy thing to get, and no one with sense would be surprised to see injustice, crime, and folly going about in broad daylight arm-in-arm, largely undisturbed, in high and low places, to the end of time.
A few generations later, in the 1930s, now with over a million Angelenos rather than the scruffy few thousand at the beginning, the ways of the world, and of the city, had not changed. And these colorful, sad, and changeless ways made work for a fictional private detective in the City of Angels—Philip Marlowe, hero of Raymond Chandler’s novels, in whose pages one finds Marlowe conducting his irregular search for truth and justice while the city puts the best face it can on what justice it has to offer… to continue reading please click here.