Fallen Angels

Raymond Chandler

Chandler, master of hardboiled heartache.

It started with drinks and ended in a quadruple murder. And along the way there were tantalizing plot twists and devious turns—from visits to an old flophouse to a favorite watering hole. The 30 alumni and friends who participated in our Raymond Chandler noir weekend in Los Angeles learned how the physical spaces of ’40s L.A. shaped his world and factored into his fiction. And to cap things off, we saw the inner workings of a crime lab, replete with blood splatter analysis, and a retracing of a real homicide investigation. As Chandler once wrote, “a good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.”