In this excerpt from his classic City of Quartz, Mike Davis examines the home security arms race that erected gates, walls, and thousands of "Armed Response" lawn placards across suburban Los Angeles in the Reagan era.
The Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler was an unstructured city, and the social types are here nowhere near as pronounced. By the chance of a historical accident, Chandler was able to benefit from the survival of a purely linguistic, typological way of creating his characters after the system of types that had supported it was already disappearing
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