As I’ve written previously, this is a passion project, a novel about two writers I’ve read and admired and studied for years now. My book centers on a fictional meeting of hard-boiled writer Raymond Chandler, banging out the manuscript to his debut The Big Sleep, and Nathanael West, himself working on his opus The Day of the Locust.
Chandler & West is also a love letter to Los Angeles, especially the L.A. during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Pre-release sales have been better than expected. They’re so good, yesterday I noticed the book sitting at #37 on Amazon’s U.S. Biographical Literary Fiction best sellers chart:
The Kindle edition is available at a special limited-time price of $2.99, which will go up later this month. A paperback edition is also available. And, Kindle Unlimited subscribers may read it for free.
It’s here—the Kindle and paperback editions of my latest novel, Chandler & West: A Story of Los Angeles, may now be reserved on Amazon.
The Kindle edition is available at a special limited-time price of $2.99, which will go up after the book has been released. If you order now, it will appear on your Kindle reader the day of its release (February 9th, 2026).
This is my latest passion project, a novel about two writers I’ve read and studied for many years now. It centers on a fictional meeting of hard-boiled writer Raymond Chandler, banging out the manuscript to his debut The Big Sleep, and Nathanael West, himself working on his own magnum opus The Day of the Locust. Together, they scour the landscape of Los Angeles, 1939, which was a rich and dynamic time in the history of the city.
Some exciting news—here’s the proof copy of the paperback for Chandler & West, my upcoming novel.
If you haven’t been following along, Chandler & West is a new novel about two of Los Angeles’ greatest writers—Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West—and set in 1939 Hollywood.
It’s a new crime novel about two of Los Angeles’ greatest writers under unusual conditions, while they toil to finish their novels (Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust).
I’ve now posted a sample chapter from the novel, available to read online. It gives a good taste of what the book’s about, especially as a snapshot of Raymond Chandler’s life around 1939.
If you’d like more information, please consider subscribing to my newsletter. Otherwise, keep watching this space for announcements as the release date approaches.
I’m proud to announce my next upcoming book, Chandler & West: A Story of Los Angeles. It’s a new crime novel about two of Los Angeles’ greatest writers, set in the Golden Age of Hollywood.
This book has been a true labor of love, in terms of research and preparation, but also in the writing. Getting this book over the goal line has meant dealing with numerous hurdles, but the moment has finally arrived.
I anticipate to release Kindle and paperback editions in the first quarter of 2026.
If you’re interested in learning more, I encourage you to sign up for my newsletter. (You’ll be able to download a free book in the process!) I’m sharing sneak previews and sample chapters with newsletter subscribers, as well as a chance to sign up for Advance Review Copies (ARCs) of the book prior to its release.
Keep watching this space for more information on my latest endeavor.
Years ago I discovered on Forest Books‘ sidewalk cart an unassuming hardback with an unassuming title, Great American Detective Stories, edited by legendary Bay Area writer Anthony Boucher and published in June 1945.
Curious what stories made the cut, I expected the usual names and the usual reprinted titles. I did see the usual names—Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich being of the most interest to me—but was surprised by Boucher’s story selections. He included one of the three Sam Spade short stories Hammett wrote for easy money (which were not widely reprinted until recently). The Chandler selection was a novella I’d never heard of before, “No Crime in the Mountains”, which appears to have been the nucleus (Chandler would say “cannibalized”) for The Lady in the Lake.
Over the years I’ve dipped into this collection on occasion, and discovered it to be a fine snapshot of late-World War II popular American writing.
But it was the book’s front matter that gives me pause, specifically the publisher’s note:
This book is manufactured in compliance with the War Production Board’s ruling for conserving paper. … Thinner and smaller books will not only save paper, plate metal and man power, but will make more books available to the reading public.
The reader’s understanding of this wartime problem will enable the publisher to cooperate more fully with our Government.
It’s a fine-print reminder of how the cost of war used to burden everyone’s daily life, and therefore was a constant reminder of war’s price, both in human cost and economic.
Printed above the note:
“Books are weapons in the war of ideas.”
– President Roosevelt
They still are, but we’ve allowed our attention to wander, and it’s to our detriment.
With Raymond Chandler so intimately associated with mid-century Los Angeles, and Chandler so determined to record the city’s excesses through his gimlet eye, it’s surprising how little of Hollywood makes it into his detective novels. The only one to dwell on the movie trade is The Little Sister, and even then, it takes twelve chapters until the reader learns the plot is somehow connected to Hollywood. Yet, The Little Sister is often nominated as one of the greatest Hollywood novels ever made.
By the time The Little Sister was published in 1949, Chandler had built a name in Hollywood as a successful screenwriter. His Oscar-nominated script for the landmark Double Indemnity (co-written with director Billy Wilder) was lauded as both an honest adaptation of James M. Cain’s bestseller and, incredibly, an improvement on the source material, which had been declared a modern classic soon after publication. Chandler was also called in to rewrite dialogue on other films, as his brisk, wisecracking style was in high demand.
Compare Chandler’s entry to Hollywood to Nathanael West’s, who churned out unremarkable scripts while writing The Day of the Locust. West did not travel to Los Angeles with stars in his eyes, nor did he arrive with impressive credentials. He strove to become a serious novelist, not a screenwriter of cheap Westerns and jungle adventures. It was the Great Depression, though, and he heard that Hollywood paid good money for writing.
He heard more than that, actually. According to Marion Meade’s Lonelyhearts, it was West’s brother-in-law—New Yorker writer S. J. Perelman—and his frothing disgust with Hollywood (“where holding a job was ‘a series of hysterical genuflexions and convulsive ass-kissings'”) that lured West to Los Angeles in search of foul-mouthed grotesqueries and high-glamour oddities he could transfer to the page. It’s not difficult to imagine Nathanael West as a character in a Raymond Chandler mystery…if only there was a blackmail angle.
As Chandler tiptoed through Hollywood’s land mines and manure fields, writing screenplays, dialogue, and movie treatments, he discovered he was not revolted or disgusted with what he saw. He was bored.
“An industry with such vast resources and such magic techniques should not become dull so soon,” he wrote in The Atlantic in 1945. “Hollywood is a showman’s paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made.”
One fascinating vein running through my list of great Hollywood novels is how often the authors were involved in the business—not only were they witnesses, they were collaborators in the insanity they documented.
“Hollywood is easy to hate,” Chandler wrote in The Atlantic, “easy to sneer at, easy to lampoon. Some of the best lampooning has been done by people who have never been through a studio gate.” By the time he wrote The Little Sister, though, he’d been through the studio gate many times.
Like Ross MacDonald, Chandler realized early on he could leverage the American hard-boiled detective novel to write about America grappling with modernity, a country suddenly flush with money and influence. The detective novel is told from the perspective of an outsider with a keen grasp of social, political, and economic realities. Chandler went heavy on the grotesque when he depicted Los Angeles, populating his novels with fortune tellers for the rich, perfumed gigolos, mob toughs talking like they had been borrowed from Hemingway’s “The Killers,” and so forth.
Chandler reels it in for The Little Sister. The novel is a bit drier than his earlier work. Most Hollywood novels brim with a fatalistic cynicism, but Chandler incorporated a more literal, perhaps even-handed, depiction of Tinseltown.
James Garner portrayed Chandler’s detective in Marlowe, a poorly-received 1969 adaptation of The Little Sister.
This literal-mindedness is what prevents The Little Sister from falling into a trope of American writing, the moralizing take-down of Hollywood as a depraved and greedy trade. Re-reading the novel for this post, I noted Chandler had included some basic scenes missing from the others in this list. His detective, Philip Marlowe, visits a sound stage during filming, where he witnesses a catty back-and-forth between the actors after the scene is flubbed. Afterwards, he drops in on a rising starlet in her dressing room. Another chapter is devoted to dealing with a big-shot movie agent eager to protect his client. These business-like scenes are the building blocks of the second half of The Little Sister.
In 1944, Chandler wrote to Atlantic editor Charles Morton:
Hollywood is the only industry in the world that pays its workers the kind of money only capitalists and big executives make in other industries. … Its pictures cost too much and therefore must be safe and bring in big returns; but why do they cost too much? Because it pays the people who do the work, not the people who cut coupons.
Marlowe sinks into this moneyed and territorial industry as ably as he deals with alcoholic flophouse managers and gangsters who dabble with ice-picks to the neck. Marlowe is surefooted no matter the situation. He is a man of all people, but party to none. This is the character type Chandler honed to a point. It was a character he used time and again to turn over rocks across Southern California to reveal the grubby crustaceans and sun-bleached bones beneath.
On the right the great fat solid Pacific trudging into shore like a scrubwoman going home. No moon, no fuss, hardly a sound of the surf. No smell. None of the harsh wild smell of the sea. A California ocean. California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing. Here we go again. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe.
The Little Sister, ch. 13
The one notable grotesque in The Little Sister is the near-real-time transformation of a Midwestern bookish, prudish young woman into a walking caricature of a star-struck pursuer of Tinseltown sophistication. Like the climax of Locust, a critical point is reached, something snaps, and Hollywood’s vapory facade mists away to something more earthy and damning.
Chandler allows a sliver of redemptive light to shine through the smoke-filled backrooms, and it lands on the unlikeliest of characters. (“Lots of nice people work in pictures,” Marlowe notes unironically at one point.) Chandler was far more the softie than his books’ hard-boiled reputation suggests. The Little Sister ends in a surprising place: Perhaps the problem is not with Hollywood, but with those too eager to believe its illusions.
