THE PORT OF MISSING WOMEN RAYMOND CHANDLER
For some time, I’ve imagined writing a novel titled The Port of Missing Women, a term I came across while doing research for my biography of Raymond Chandler, The Long Embrace. It refers to the many young women in Los Angeles who were suddenly going missing—and often turning up murdered in grisly ways. Coincidentally or not, many of these murders occurred in the years right after World War II, when a large number of servicemen were returning from overseas through the port of Los Angeles and finding, no doubt, that in many cases the women they had left behind were not the same as those they encountered when they returned. The war years had given women new freedoms in the way they acted and dressed and socialized, in part through jobs outside the home in the defense industry and other sectors of the labor force.
There were over a dozen instances of young women disappeared and murdered. The most famous case was the murder of the so-called Black Dahlia, a young raven-haired woman named Elizabeth Short. Short’s body was discovered on January 15, 1947, drained of blood and neatly severed in two, her internal organs surgically removed, her mouth cut from ear to ear in a grotesque smile. It was a murder unlike any the city or country had ever seen, and it shocked and unnerved people for a very long while, as the murderer taunted authorities with notes while evading detection. The killer was never caught.
Reading about these murders as I researched Chandler, I realized these were the sorts of crimes his detective Philip Marlowe ever confronted. Though there’s plenty of violence in Chandler’s work, the perpetrator is usually not a man but a woman: in six out of his seven novels, a female character’s Eileen Wade beats Sylvia Lennox’s face to a “bloody sponge” in a jealous rage, and in , Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle smashes Lindsay Marriott’s head to a pulp, leaving his brains on his face. Marlowe takes these women and their actions in stride as he goes about solving cases; often these are the very women to whom he ends up being most attracted.
