A Bright and Guilty Place (Hardcover) ~ Richard Rayner (Author) Cover Art

A Bright and Guilty Place (Hardcover)

By: Richard Rayner (Author)

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Review

"Reading this book, it's clear why noir fiction exploded out of Los Angeles during this time. Suddenly, Hammett and Chandler seem like realists."

"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."

Publisher's note

Traces the dual story of 1920s Los Angeles prosecutor's office crime-scene investigator Leslie White and ambitious corrupt political candidate Dave Clark, documenting how Clark was deemed a prime suspect in the brutal murder of mob boss Charlie Crawford.

Set 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 times; 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's "Low Life," this is a captivating chronicle of how the City of Angels lost its soul.

Annotation

Richard Rayner provides a hardboiled non-fiction look at 1930s Los Angeles, a place full of so much corruption, intrigue, and crime, that it seems inevitable that it spawned Raymond Chandler's brilliant noir novels. Rayner's ostensible subject is the murder of corrupt political boss Charlie "Gray Wolf" Crawford by former war hero and D.A. attorney Dave "Debonair Dave" Clark, but A BRIGHT AND GUILTY PLACE gleefully wanders on dark tangents such as the trial of Clara Bow, the blackmailed promiscuous silent screen star; the infamous double murders and police cover-up at oil tycoon E.L. Doheny's Graystone Mansion above Sunset Boulevard. In the end, like so many other books about Los Angeles, the city itself becomes Rayner's main character, a twisted, beautiful, and endlessly strange place where dreams are made and broken.

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