Getting a read on Los Angeles

As an L.A. native and a recently graduated English major, I enjoyed Scott Martelle’s overview of Los Angeles literature very much (“L.A., Chapter and Verse,” April 21). If I could add one name to the list, it would be John Fante for his masterpiece “Ask the Dust.” Fante’s Depression-era novel invokes the muse of our city of angels early on:

“Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.”

Fante captures L.A. with all its contradictions, its sadness and beauty, its history and rootlessness, its ability to sow and wither dreams, and as a result his haunting lyricism is as powerful and relevant today as ever.

Oliver Gettell

Los Angeles

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The article examining the literature inspired by L.A. suggests that Raymond Chandler’s Bay City in “Farewell, My Lovely” “existed only in Chandler’s imagination.” However, a close reading of the novel reveals that Bay City, with its gambling ships off the coast, crooked cops and quack doctors, is in fact Santa Monica, Chandler’s residence for many years. At one point, Chandler considered writing a nonfictional expose of Santa Monica, but instead portrayed it under the pseudonym Bay City, a beachside community infested with corruption.

John Toth

Palmdale