A Bright and Guilty Place

Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age

By: Richard Rayner

Narrated by: Brett Barry

Novels like The Big Sleep and L.A. Confidential, movies like Chinatown, even vampire TV shows like Angel, depict L.A. as existing in the shadows, no matter how bright the sun. That is the style we call noir.

In A Bright and Guilty Place, an exhilarating tale of murder in L.A., Richard Rayner finds the source of the city's darkness in real-life events that unfolded in the 1920s, when the booming early years of L.A. started to shade into the Depression, and the city of sunshine revealed the hidden darkness and corruption at its heart.

Rayner follows two very different characters: Leslie White, a photographer and budding novelist whose job as a crime-scene investigator for the city prosecutor's office lands him right in the middle of some of the age's biggest scandals; and Dave Clark, a charming, 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. The two men live in an L.A. populated by corrupt preachers, dark-hearted oil barons, sexually perverse starlets, and hookers with a heart of gold. It is a city controlled by organized crime to such an extent that when Al Capone came to see about setting up a syndicate there, he was run out of town without a single shot fired. And the tension comes to a boiling point when the head of the crime syndicate, Charlie Crawford, is found murdered in cold blood and the chief suspect is none other than golden boy Dave Clark.

Raymond Chandler, that bard of L.A. despair, would later turn the travails of Dave Clark and Leslie White into the superlatively pessimistic fiction which has defined L.A. for generations. And in A Bright and Guilty Place, Richard Rayner has done something similar, transporting us to a turning point in the life of a great city. In the murderous events in these pages, we witness how sunny Los Angeles came of age - and got noir.

©2009, 2010 Richard Rayner (P)2011 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"A captivating chronicle of how the City of Angels lost its soul." (Amazon.com review)

"Brilliant.... The nonfiction equivalent of the Raymond Chandler classics.... Utterly truthful, fantastic and new." ( Los Angeles Times)

"[A] multi­faceted literary high wire act. . . . Rayner can write an engaging sentence and construct an artful, evocative yarn." ( The New York Times Book Review)

I enjoyed because I grew up in L.A. in 1950s.

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

I found this book very interesting because I grew up in Los Angeles. Not so sure it would have been as interesting if I were from Boston.

Would you recommend A Bright and Guilty Place to your friends? Why or why not?

I would recommend to some of my friends but not all of my friends because I suspect that it could be tedious for some of my friends.

Didn't hold my interest

I listened to the first 3 hours, but wasn't enjoying it. I tried to listen to more just because I had paid for it and then realized that was just stupid when it felt like drudgery.