Download A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age AudioBook Free
Novels like The Big Rest and L.A. Confidential, films like Chinatown, even vampire TV shows like Angel, depict L.A. as existing in the shadows, no matter how bright sunlight. That is the style we call noir. In A Bright and Guilty Place, an exciting tale of murder in L.A., Richard Rayner confirms the foundation of the city's darkness in real-life occurrences that unfolded in the 1920s, when the booming early years of L.A. began to shade into the Depression, and the location of sunshine exposed the invisible darkness and corruption at its center. Rayner comes after two completely different individuals: Leslie White, a photographer and budding novelist whose job as a crime-scene investigator for the location prosecutor's office lands him right in the center of a few of the age's biggest scandals; and Dave Clark, a enchanting, handsome prosecutor-turned-political candidate whose ambition and voracious appetites drive him into the bowels of L.A.'s corrupt politics and perhaps even to murder. Both men reside in an L.A. filled by corrupt preachers, dark-hearted engine oil barons, sexually perverse starlets, and hookers with a center of gold. It is a city manipulated by organized offense to this extent that whenever Al Capone came to see about establishing a syndicate there, he was run out of town without a single shot fired. And the tension involves a boiling point when the head of the offense syndicate, Charlie Crawford, is found murdered in wintry blood and the principle suspect is the one and only golden young man Dave Clark. Raymond Chandler, that bard of L.A. despair, would later change the travails of Dave Clark and Leslie White into the superlatively pessimistic fiction which has identified L.A. for decades. And in A Bright and Guilty Place, Richard Rayner did something similar, moving us to a turning point in the life of any great city. Inside the murderous occurrences in these pages, we witness how sunny Los Angeles came old - and received noir.
