A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age
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Los Angeles was the fastest-growing city in the world, mad with oil fever, get-rich-quick schemes, and celebrity scandals. It was also rife with organized crime, with a mayor in the pocket of the syndicates and a DA taking bribes to throw trials. In A Bright and Guilty Place, Richard Rayner narrates the entwined lives of two men, Dave Clark and Leslie White, who were caught up in the crimes, murders, and swindles of the day. Over a few transformative years, as the boom times shaded into the Depression, the adventures of Clark and White would inspire pulp fiction and replace L.A.'s reckless optimism with a new cynicism. Together, theirs is the tale of how the city of sunshine went noir. Publishers Weekly In his unfocused history of crime-ridden Los Angeles in the 1920s, nonfiction writer and novelist Rayner (The Associates) touches on too many scandals-and scandalous characters-to make his account coherent. Leslie White, the young and idealistic DA's investigator (and, later, pulp fiction writer) seems like the only honest man in town, especially compared with the likes of promising prosecutor-turned-murder-suspect Dave Clark. Before the Depression hit, L.A. was swimming in wealth, not only from the burgeoning Hollywood studios but also from the oil boom. White saw firsthand how deep the city's corruption ran, from organized crime boss Charlie Crawford's "System," whose tentacles reached the highest echelons of politics and law enforcement, to the press, always ravenous for another sensational story, a "circulation-boosting crusade." Crawford's brutal murder in 1931 and star prosecutor Clark's emergence as the prime suspect is only one of the tales Rayner touches on in his chaotic chronicle of the city. Despite cameos by familiar faces-including noir master Raymond Chandler-readers may be overwhelmed by the onslaught of details, intriguing as they might be. (June 23)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Cast of Characters xi1 The Mystery Is Announced 12 Dam Disaster 73 A Hero Named Clark 164 Angel City 255 The Gangster Goes Down 356 Oil, Law, and Scandal 427 Oup Detective Learns the Ropes 508 Shots in the Night 559 Beverly Hills C.S.I 6010 Covep-Up 6811 Good Time Charlie 7612 Systems Under Siege 8813 Reach for a Typewriter 9814 Raymond Chandler - Oil Man! 10315 Entrapment of a News Hound 11016 Running with the Foxes 11517 Zig-Zags of Graft 12118 Red Hot Bow 13119 The Gutting of Clara 13820 Hard Times in Lotus-Land 14821 Double Death on Sunset 15422 The Ballad of Dave Clark 16323 They Can Hang You 17524 Telling It All 18325 Verdicts 19326 A Hooker's Tale 20127 Music of the City 20628 Black Mask Merry-Go-Round 21229 Sad Song 21930 Lives Go On 22431 A Personal Note 230Afterword 237Acknowledgments 241Sources 243Bibliography 253Index 261
