A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age
Book DescriptionA 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. InA 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.WhenA Bright and Guilty Placebegins, Leslie White is a naïve 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 Placeis 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.Richard Rayner onA Bright and Guilty  PlaceI’ve written eight books now—both fiction and non-fiction—and in so far as my writing  career has had a constant, it’s been California in general, and Los Angeles in particular. My first  novel,Los Angeles Without a Map, published  back in 1988, was about an English guy’s love affair with a Playboy bunny. It was later turned into the  least-famous film ever to feature Johnny Depp. I’d grown up in the north of England and the material in  that book came out of visits I’d made to the city as a journalist. Later, in 1991, I came to live in  L.A. with the woman who became my wife (she’s wonderful, and not a Playboy bunny). We intended to stay  for six months. Now 18 years have passed. Our kids were born in Santa Monica Hospital and we’re still  here, stuck it sometimes seems, resident aliens in a city I now know intimately well and still don’t  quite understand. Not in terms of its effect on me, anyway.I reported on the Rodney King riots for the literary magazineGranta, on the Northridge  earthquake for theU.K. Guardian, on various movie stars for theNew Yorker, and on the  LAPD for theNew York Timesmagazine. Riding around town in the back of black and whites, I saw  cops do brave and sometimes stupid things. A couple of murders happened smack in front of my eyes, and  I came to see Los Angeles in a different way, as a place where the light and dark tones of life are  always co-mingled, sometimes comically, sometimes tragically. This texture of feeling was always  associated for me with the genre known as ‘noir’, crime stories that had their roots, I came to learn,  not only in the fiction and film of the 1930s and 1940s (writers like Raymond Chandler, movies such asDouble IndemnityandThe Big Sleep—each of them particular to  Southern California) but in the true crime stories that preceded them, in the late 1920s and early  1930s, the golden era of American tabloid journalism.So I started poking around, doing research about true crime in L.A. in the pre-WW2 era. This  involved lots of interviews, lots of trips to the great research libraries at UCLA and USC and the  photo archive of the main Los Angeles Public Library, the basement of which is like aRaiders of the Lost Ark-style warehouse, filled  with historical goodies.Various stories and characters began to obsess me. One such story concerned Leslie White, a young  photographer from Ventura County who came to Los Angeles after the St. Francis Dam disaster in 1928 and  got a job as a forensics investigator (think early CSI) with the District Attorney’s office. White  worked on many of the big cases of the era (including the infamous, and unsolved Doheny mansion  murder/suicide) and came to see that the DA’s office was a part of the civic corruption it was supposed  to be fighting; so he used his experiences and turned himself into a pulp fiction writer in the early  1930s, publishing inBlack Maskand elsewhere. He knew, and influenced, Raymond Chandler.Some tale. But not as good as that of David H. Clark (known as "Debonair Dave"), a heroic flyer in  WW1 and graduate of USC law who also went to work for the DA’s office, but as a prosecutor. Clark  nailed mobsters and argued the case that wrecked the career of Clara Bow (then the world’s biggest  movie star). Clark had a beautiful wife and an actor’s glamour. Then he himself, in 1931, was put on  trial for murder, accused of rubbing out one Charlie Crawford, the then head of the Los Angeles  underworld. Only in L.A.!The Clark case was as sensational, and as headline-grabbing, in its day, as that which, sixty years  later, featured O.J. Simpson. And when I discovered that Leslie White had known Dave Clark, and had  indeed been called upon to testify against his friend, I realized I might have the spine of a  fascinating book. Why had Clark—seemingly a beacon of rectitude—been sucked to the dark  side? His story reminded me of Michael Corleone inThe Godfather, except, of course, it was  true.At the heart ofA Bright and Guilty Place, then, are the intertwined destinies of these two  men, White and Clark, one a success in his own quirky way, the other propelled towards self-destruction  and tragedy. I believe, too, that the book gives a portrait of a city in tumult, in the agonising  throes—as the boom years of the 1920s turn to the Great Depression—of discovering an  identity that will always be bound up with the types of mood and crime thatA Bright and Guilty  Placeevokes. Los Angeles isn’t just dark, or light—it’s always both at the same time.—Richard Rayner(Photo © Robert Yager)