Dolores del Rio mural painted by Los Angeles artist Alfredo De Batuc
If you have already seen all the regular tourist sights LA has to offer, you might consider exploring the underbelly of the city with Esotouric. The company known for its Black Dahlia themed tour is adding a variety of crime history and crime fiction offerings this summer.
The former Cathedral of Saint Vibiana
Esotouric tours cover many of LA’s less well-known personalities and events, like the Black Dahlia murders, the hard-boiled noir of Raymond Chandler, the life and times of author John Fante, a precursor to the Beatnik writers and Riot on the Sunset Strip about the explosion of the music scene in mid-’60s LA.
The first Crime Bus tour began in January 2006, visiting the real-life sites of infamous mayhem, including the spot where the dismembered body of Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. the Black Dahlia, was found.
The Club Galaxy-100 Beautiful Girls
Tours:
Fante’s tour- It covers the Bunker Hill haunts that in many ways defined both his life and his work.
The five-hour Chandler tour: It covers Hollywood hotspots of yore.
The Riot tour: It focuses on the history of the infamous Sunset Strip.
The Real Black Dahlia tour and Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles are two of the fascinating true crime and crime fiction tours of LA.
Riot on Sunset Strip: It’s a Hollywood tour that contains extensive material from the new book by Domenic Priore, Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock’n'Roll’s Last Stand In Hollywood.
The architectural tour: It debuts in fall 2007 and focuses on the work of Reyner Banham who was a prolific architectural critic best known for his books Theory and Design in the First Machine Age and Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.
Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles-In a Lonely Place: It’s a ‘must do’ for fans of Chandler, Philip Marlowe, crime writing, noir novels and movies alike. It’s a 5-hour tour of those mean streets, taking in LA’s downtown.
Raymond Chandler Square on Hollywood Boulevard
Tickets are $55, and tours usually last for several hours.
Source: USA Today
