What interested Chandler was the here and now of the daily experience of the now historical Los Angeles: the stucco dwellings, cracked sidewalks, tarnished sunlight, and roadsters in which the curiously isolated yet typical specimens of an unimaginable Southern California social flora and fauna ride in the monadic half-light of their dashboards. Chandler’s problem was that his readers - ourselves - desperately needed not to see that reality…The excitement of the mystery-plot is, then, a blind, fixing our attention on the ostensible but in reality quite trivial puzzles and suspense in such a way that the intolerable space of Southern California can enter the eye laterally, with its intensity undiminished.
— Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future
