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.
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