Esotouric to offer Raymond Chandler's L.A. tour

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 April 25, 12pm-4pm, departs from Lincoln Heights/CypressMetro Station

COST: $58/person (15% off for KCRW and KPCC members; $5 for grandparents riding with a grandchild who is a teen or older) including Chandler-themed gelato from Scoops

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

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

This April, the eclectic bus adventure company Esotouric offers a special promotional ticket designed to bring the generations together to explore local history and lore. Any grandparent who rides with a full-price grandchild (teens and up) pays just $5 for their seat, and the grandchild receives a pop culture goodie bag. The deal is in honor of Esotouric founder Kim Cooper's grandfather Harry (one half of the nonagenarian blog sensations The OGs), celebrating his 97th birthday this month and riding along on every tour. For more on The OGs, visit http://www.the-ogs.com

On April 25, Esotouric 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 Los Angeles, 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
Thurs April 9 - The Hippodrome (Downtown Art Walk Shuttle, free)
Sat April 11 - Raymond Chandler's Bay City (tour eligible for PopPop's Pals Promotion)
Sat April 18 - The Real Black Dahlia (tour eligible for PopPop's Pals Promotion)
Sat April 25 - Raymond Chandler's LA (tour eligible for PopPop's Pals Promotion)
Sat May 2 - Blood & Dumplings
Thurs May 14 - The Hippodrome (Downtown Art Walk Shuttle, free)
Sat May 16 - Weird West Adams
Sat May 23 - Pasadena Confidential
Sat May 30 - The Birth of Noir: James M. Cain's SoCal Nightmare
Sun June 7 - South LA architecture tour
Thurs June 11 - The Hippodrome (Downtown Art Walk Shuttle, free)
Sat June 13 - Vroman's edition: Blood & Dumplings
Sat June 20 - Route 66 architecture tour

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