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.
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
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