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Title: A Bright and Guilty Place

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

Author: Richard Rayner

Narrator: Brett Barry

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins

Language: English

Release date: 12-19-11

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 27 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

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.

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)

Members Reviews:

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.

Excellent audio book

What made the experience of listening to A Bright and Guilty Place the most enjoyable?

This is a side of L.A. that I had never heard of before. I remember hearing that it had been very corrupt in the 20s and 30s but not to this extent. It was totally fascinating to read about the history of the city and its people. Amazing what went on in the town. I love

history and really enjoyed this book.

What was one of the most memorable moments of A Bright and Guilty Place?

When 'the' murder was committed. I was actually very surprised at the about total about face of the person involved.