Literary Los Angeles: Old Money, Oil Money, and The Big Sleep

For several months now I’ve been sitting with The Big Sleep, utterly absorbed in its stylish mischief but without any idea of what I might add to the conversation. It is a novel about which it is almost impossible to say anything new, and indeed the dark-heart-of-Hollywood motif that was still somewhat shocking upon the novel’s publication in 1939 is now the stuff of cliché and beyond cliché, it is the stuff of camp. I loved it, of course, as The Big Sleep is impossible not to love for its tawrdiness, its audacity, and its intelligence, even when that intelligence is dressed up—or down—as tough-guy talk.

On his first visit to the Sternwood mansion, Marlowe says, “A winding driveway dropped down between retaining walls to the open iron gates. Beyond the fence the hill sloped for several miles. On this lower level faint and far off I could just barely see some of the old wooden derricks of the oilfield from which the Sternwoods had made their money. Most of the field was public park now, cleaned up and donated to the city by General Sternwood. But a little of it was still producing in groups of wells pumping five or six barrels a day. The Sternwoods, having moved up the hill, could no longer smell the stale sump water or the oil, but they could still look out of their front windows and see what had made them rich. If they wanted to. I didn’t suppose they would want to.”

Like water rights in the film “Chinatown,” these oil fields are the mundane underpinning of a lot of very florid fantasies involving roulette, revolvers, and naked young women dressed up like Isis.

It is a commonplace today to talk about how Los Angeles made its money off the stuff of dreams—that is, more prosaically, from the entertainment industry. But Los Angeles made its money first on oil and oranges, about which far fewer people dream. And as The Big Sleep reminds us, the old money in Los Angeles isn’t old enough yet to be sufficiently removed from the crude stuff that made it.

So perhaps I would look at The Big Sleep differently after a little bit of a history lesson.  I had initially planned on reading next a sort of companion piece to The Big Sleep, The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, but now I feel perhaps some nonfiction is in order first, something about the geography of the place that has contributed to the corrupting wealth of L.A.’s old money. City of Quartz comes to mind but I would love to hear about other titles in the comments.