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

A captivating chronicle of how the City of Angels lost its soul 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 L.A.'s reckless optimism with a 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 L.A. district attorney's office. There he meets Dave Clark, a young, movie-star handsome lawyer and a rising star prosecutor with big ambitions. The cases they tried were some of the first "trials of the century," starring dark-hearted oil barons, sexually perverse starlets, and hookers with hearts of gold. Los Angeles was in the grip of organized crime, and White was dismayed to see that only the innocent paid while the powerful walked free. But Clark was entranced by L.A.'s dangerous lures and lived the high life, marrying a beautiful woman, wearing custom-made suits, yachting with the rich and powerful, and jaunting off to Mexico for gambling and girls. In a shocking twist, when Charlie Crawford, the Al Capone of L.A., was found dead, the chief suspect was none other than golden boy Dave Clark. "A Bright and Guilty Place "is narrative nonfiction at its most gripping. Key to the tale are the story of the theft of water from the Owens River Valley that let L.A grow; the Teapot Dome scandal that brought shame to President Harding; and the emergence of crime writers like Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, who helped mythologize L.A. In Rayner's hands, the ballad of Dave Clark is the story of the coming of age of a great American city.

About the Author :
Richard Rayner is the author of "Drake's Fortune," "The Cloud Sketcher," "The Associates," and several other books. His writing appears in "The New Yorker," the "Los Angeles Times," and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles.

Review :
Praise for "A 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. In "A 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 the "Illustrated 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 glit