A Bright and Guilty Place

by Rayner, Richard

This book is a captivating chronicle of how the City of Angels lost its soul. In the 1920s Los Angeles was the fastest growing city in the world, mad with oil fever, get-rich-quick schemes, celebrity scandals, and religious fervor. 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 LA's reckless optimism with the new cynicism. Together, theirs is the tale of how the city of sunshine got noir. When A Bright and Guilty Place begins, Leslie White is a naive young photographer who lands a job as a crime-scene investigator in the LA District Attorney's office. There he meets Dave Clark, a yo