Esotouric invites you to trace the path of Philip Marlowe

Follow in the Footsteps of Philip Marlowe thru Raymond Chandler's Downtown and Hollywood

WHAT: "Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles: In A Lonely Place" bus tour

WHEN: Saturday February 21, 12pm-4pm, departs from Lincoln Heights/Cypress Metro Station

COST: $58/person (15% off for KCRW and KPCC members) including Chandler-themed gelato from Scoops

MORE INFO: visit http://www.esotouric.com or call 323-223-2767

TOUR REPEATS: April 25. Also, on April 11 Esotouric offers the Raymond Chandler's Bay City tour of Santa Monica and Malibu.

In February Esotouric, the eclectic bus adventure company whose tours reveal L.A.'s secret history, presents a literary tour dedicated to the city's greatest detective novelist, Raymond Chandler, and his personal relationship to the mean streets of Hollywood and Downtown LA, where he lived, worked and set his stories.

RAYMOND CHANDLER'S LOS ANGELES: IN A LONELY PLACE delves deep into a lost city that exists in shadowy parallels to contemporary LA. Bungalows. Crime. Hollywood. Blondes. Vets. Smog. Death. This was Raymond Chandler's LosAngeles, which resonated from deft and melancholy fits of his writer's bow.

Join Esotouric on an exploration of the city that shaped Chandler's fiction,and that in turn shaped his hard-boiled times, in a four hour tour of downtown, Hollywood and surrounding environs: Musso & Frank, Union Station, the Hotel Van Nuys, Paramount Studio's gates, and much, much more. On this tour, you'll discover why an unassuming stretch of Olive Street near Pershing Square is much more deserving of the Raymond Chandler Square designation than the Hollywood corner that bears the honored name.

Through published work, private correspondence, screenplays and film adaptations, the tour traces Chandler's search for meaning and his anti-hero Philip Marlowe's struggle to not be pigeonholed or give anything less than all he has, which lead them both down the rabbit hole of isolation, depression, and drink. As the bus rolls from point to point, your guide Richard Schave draw the lines between Chandler's life and his fiction, offering insight into his peculiar marriage to the much-older Cissy, the enigmatic redhead who appears in many forms in his short stories and novels.

The tour includes a stop at Scoops Gelato in East Hollywood for a complementary sampling of avant garde ice cream master Tai Kim's unexpected flavors, which have in the past included the Chandler-inspired Bacon-Caramel and Nicotine (made with crushed Nicorette gum).

Upcoming Esotouric bus tour schedule
Sun Feb 1 - Reyner Banham Loves LA: South LA architecture tour
Thurs Feb 12 - The Hippodrome & Hazard's Pavilion (Downtown Art WalkShuttles, free)
Sat Feb 14- Valentine's Day edition of Blood & Dumplings crime bus tour
Sat Feb 21- Raymond Chandler's LA
Sat Feb 28 - Crawling Down Cahuenga: Tom Waits' LA
Sat March 7 - The Lowdown on Downtown: The Secret History of LA
Thurs March 12 - The Hippodrome & Hazard's Pavilion (Downtown Art WalkShuttles, free)
Sat March 14 ­ Haunts of a Dirty Old Man: Charles Bukowski's LA
Sat March 21 ­ Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice
Sat March 28 ­ Pasadena Confidential
Sat April 4 - Wild Wild Westside
Sat April 11 - Raymond Chandler's Bay City
Sat April 18 - The Real Black Dahlia
Sat April 25 - Raymond Chandler's LA

For more info on Esotouric, visit http://www.esotouric.com