Little Garwood wrote: ↑Tue Jul 05, 2022 4:19 pm
Pahonu wrote: ↑Mon Jul 04, 2022 10:06 pm
Garwood,
This is spooky.
The episode led me to Dash Hammett as well! I remember going to the library in early high school and finding a collection of short stories with the Continental Op and The Maltese Falcon. It lead me to other hard-boiled detective fiction and the many film adaptations.
Margaux in Italian Ice even mentions Myrna Loy. Bellisario must have been a fan.
During the late '90s I obsessed over Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels and read them so often that I burned myself out on the genre. I've never set foot in California, but Chandler's work described a vivid Los Angeles that has stayed in my memory ever since. I especially love
Farewell, My Lovely;
The Big Sleep; and
The Lady in the Lake. I didn't "connect" with
The Long Goodbye but appreciated it a lot more after having watched the Altman film.
Offhand, I can't think of any
Five-O episodes that did hardboiled Noir, but they did do a few "drawing-room mystery" kind of things (one with the Lou Richards and his teeth), but the show covered just about everything else.
That’s too bad you’ve never been to California. There’s so much to see. I’ve been lucky enough to visit every state but four, Alaska, Maine, New Hampshire, and West Virginia. Several were only one visit, but I have family in about a dozen states in the West, South, and Northeast and have traveled multiple times exploring the environs.
There’s a well-known old Hollywood restaurant my wife and I enjoy called Musso and Frank. It opened in 1919 and I think you might appreciate its heritage. Not only did Hollywood celebrities like Chaplin, Valentino, Garbo, and Bogart dine there, but it became a hangout for authors turned screenwriters. From their website:
With the Screen Writers Guild just across the street, the writers — tired of working under the execs’ watchful eyes began to spend time at the restaurant.
If they weren't in Musso’s Back Room, they could be found at the Stanley Rose Bookshop, which at the time was Musso’s neighbor to the east. Working late into the night under the comforting amber glow of the great chandeliers in the famous Back Room, writers like literary greats F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler would have considered Musso’s a second home.
Fitzgerald was known to proofread his novels while sitting in a booth at Musso’s. Faulkner met his mistress of 20 years here, and was so chummy with the bartenders in the Back Room, that he used to go behind the bar to mix his own mint juleps. Raymond Chandler wrote several chapters of “The Big Sleep” while sipping drinks in the Back Room.
T.S. Elliot, William Saroyan, Aldous Huxley, Max Brand, John Steinbeck, John O’Hara and Dorothy Parker also made their home at the Musso bar.
The amazing part is that the old red leather booths and the wood bar are still there! Almost nothing has changed in over a century.
Magnum's feeble attempt at dressing like Dashiell Hammett eventually led me to that author's work, not to mention the Thin Man films. That episode also directed me toward the 1920s, an era which fascinates me in part due to the "Lost Generation" writers. Magnum has had quite an impact on me.
