The thought hit as soon as the bus pulled up: "I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun." Actually, what I really had was a notebook, a pen, and a digital recorder. Oh yeah, and a seat on Esotouric's Raymond Chandler Bus Tour, having decided to learn whether L.A. really is, as Chandler's hard-bitten detective Philip Marlowe once said, "just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style." To find out, I...