A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming...

Number of Pages288 PagesAbout this productProduct IdentifiersPublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing GroupISBN-100385509707ISBN-139780385509701eBay Product ID (ePID)71112931Product Key FeaturesBook TitleBright and Guilty Place : Murder, Corruption, and L. A. 's Scandalous Coming of AgeNumber of Pages288 PagesLanguageEnglishPublication Year2009TopicUnited States / State & Local / West (Ak, CA, Co, Hi, Id, Mt, Nv, Ut, WY), Murder / General, United States / 20th Century, Corruption & Misconduct, General, Organized Crime, United States / GeneralIllustratorYesGenrePolitical Science, True Crime, HistoryAuthorRichard RaynerFormatHardcoverDimensionsItem Height1.2 inItem Weight20 ozItem Length9.5 inItem Width6.4 inAdditional Product FeaturesIntended AudienceTradeLCCN2008-043905TitleLeadingADewey Edition22ReviewsPraise forA Bright and Guilty Place "In the early 1980s, just before Los Angeles put on its second Olympic Games, British journalist Richard Rayner came here and fell reluctantly, madly in love with this city. Los Angeles -- from which I write -- offered him a blithe nuttiness: earthquakes, civil unrest, mindless heat (Rayner once spied a hapless citizen trying to take shelter from the sun in the shade of a telephone pole) and especially, a panoply of truly grotesque and off-the-wall crime. InA Bright and Guilty Place, Rayner uses crime as a key to the secrets of this seductive metropolis, and the time frame he has chosen seems unnervingly appropriate for today: He begins with the last few euphoric years before the crash of 1929 and continues a few more years, into the depths of the Depression, by which time somber reality had knocked optimistic if corrupt L.A. off its shaky emotional pins. To love this book you have to love the wonderful novels of Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy, where only the flimsiest veneer of freshness and glamour covers a decaying, even disgusting reality. If you can go along with that point of view, this social history will be a bonanza for you, a boundless source of creepy joy. I am probably this book's perfect reader. Among the cast of characters in this complex and bristling narrative is Gene Coughlin, a top newspaper reporter of the time, mainly for theIllustrated Daily News; Matt Weinstock, that paper's city editor, shows up on Page 2; crime reporter Casey Shawhan on Page 98. They were all poker-playing buddies of my old Texan dad. My father knew he lived in a magic time, and I remember it -- in glimpses -- from when I was a little girl: our dining room turned into a poker parlor; handsome, raffish men and beautiful women; oh-so-cool banter; rivers of whiskey; clouds of cigarette smoke. These are the men who first reported on these magnificently awful shenanigans. They made history out of glitter and crime and the enchantment of ephemeral worlds. If you love the idea of all that, you'll really loveA Bright and Guilty Place." --Carolyn See,The Washington Post Book World "A cracking good murder case--a true crime story that's driven by several fascinating characters and that's also engaging and suspenseful....An artful and evocative yarn." --The New York Times Book Review "Everything has its counterpart. For every piece of matter there is a like piece of antimatter, for every movie star there is or will be a like TV star. For every Steve McQueen a Lee Majors, for every Marlon Brando an Arthur Fonzarelli. (These facts have been established.) In his brilliant new book,A Bright and Guilty Place, Richard Rayner has given us, finally and definitively, the nonfiction equivalent of the Raymond Chandler classics that fell like hammer blows in the middle of last century:Farewell, My Lovely, The Long Goodbye, The Big Sleep.Chandler turned fact, the criminal underworld of Depression-era Los Angeles, into fiction, and now Rayner, by a strange Didion-like alchemy, has turned fiction back into fact. Not to say he has dug up the story behind the story, as a reporter might profile the real white whale, but that he has run the world of Chandler through the machine a second time, the result being utterly truthful, fantastic and new. At the center of the book stand two characters, the good soul and the killer, Abel and Cain, around whom the story spins as cotton candy spins its wispy strands around a paper handle: Leslie White, 'sickly, smart, dedicated, eager to be good,' who moved to Los Angeles in 1928 and took a job as an investigator at the district attorney's office, where his optimism was soon ground down (he would become a writer of pulp fiction); and Los Angeles native Dave Clark, who traced his lineage to explorer William Clark. You could not inve, Praise forA Bright and Guilty Place "Set in Los Angeles during the Roaring Twenties,A Bright and Guilty Placeweaves the stories of two men, an idealistic crime-scene investigator and a charismatic politico, who stood on opposite sides of a scandal that shaped a city's identity and darkened its soul. Richard Rayner makes masterful use of his material-sex, murder, corruption, greed, and the invention of noir-to concoct a seething, sinful tale worthy of Raymond Chandler himself. This is narrative nonfiction at its best: meticulously researched, deftly drawn, and more compelling than anything the imagination might dare to conjure." -Karen Abbott, author ofSin in the Second City "A Bright and Guilty Placeis a seductively readable knot of intersecting stories about pre-noir Los Angeles. It has an intriguing shape, a spectrum of emotions, beckoning suspense, satisfying inevitability, and a flavor all its own, at once familiar and strange." -Luc Sante, author ofLow Life "Thanks to this detailed and cinematic narrative of desperate people in a desperate city, LA the place, LA the novel, and LA the film are fused into a tour  de  force of LA noir." -Kevin Starr, University of Southern CaliforniaDewey Decimal364.109794/9409042SynopsisSet in roaring twenties Los Angeles, A BRIGHT AND GUILTY PLACE is the story of Leslie White, a budding pulp-fiction writer whose job as a crime-scene investigator for the city prosecutor's office lands him in the middle of some of the biggest scandals of the × and Dave Clark, a charming prosecutor turned political candidate whose ambitions drive him into the bowels of L.A.'s thriving criminal underground. When Charlie Crawford, the Al Capone of L.A., meets his gruesome death, Clark, amazingly, emerges as the chief suspect. Richard Rayner portrays an L.A. controlled by organized crime, where brutal murders, spectacular trials, political misdeeds, and the sexual perversities of Hollywood starlets are chronicled in graphic detail in the tabloids; where writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett transformed a dark reality into gripping fiction; and whose events would inspire the shadowy L.A. of film noir. Joining bestselling histories of America's great cities, like Erik Larsen's The Devil in the White City and Luc Sante'sLow Life, this is a captivating chronicle of how the City of Angels lost its soul., Hard-boiled detectives, scheming starlets, and tabloid trials fill this dramatic story of the early years and coming-of-age of Los Angeles.