A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder,
Corruption, and L.A.s Scandalous
Coming of Age by Richard Rayner
The Forgotten Noir L.A. Of The Roaring 20S
Book Description A 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. In A 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.

When A Bright and Guilty Place begins, 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 Place is 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 on A Bright and Guilty Place
I’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 magazine Granta, on the Northridge
earthquake for the U.K. Guardian, on various movie stars for the New
Yorker, and on the LAPD for the New York Times magazine. 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 as Double
Indemnity and The 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 a Raiders
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 in Black
Mask and 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 in The Godfather, except, of course, it was true.
At the heart of A 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 that A Bright and Guilty Place evokes. Los
Angeles isn’t just dark, or light—it’s always both at the same time. —
Richard Rayner

(Photo © Robert Yager)
Personal Review: A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption,
and L.A.s Scandalous Coming of Age by Richard Rayner
For those who've not yet discovered Richard Rayner, he is the author of an
unflinchingly honest memoir of youthful bad behavior and obsessive book
thievery (`The Blue Suit'), one of the most amusing "first encounters with
L.A." novels (`L.A. Without A Map'), a spot-on L.A./Vegas noir (`The Devil's
Wind') and one of the great romantic novels (`The Cloud Sketcher') of the
last decade which manages to combine the Finnish Civil War, the Roaring
20s, and mad skyscraper-love, paying tribute to the best aspects of both
the film and the novel of Rand's `The Fountainhead.' Up to that point
Rayner was only just revving his engine: the next three books, each better
than the last, are a triumvirate of well-told tales that tread the same path as
the popular histories of Simon Winchester, Erik Larson, and the legendary
David Halberstam. The first of these was `Drake's Fortune' the story of a
particularly American con game too big, brassy and bold to be true - but of
course it was; the second, last year's `The Associates' a brief yet
toothsome account of the rise of California's `Big Four' railroad barons
during the Gilded Age; and now Rayner's best book to date, the aptly titled
`A Bright and Guilty Place,' a dizzying tour of Los Angeles in the 20s,
starring an Ellroyesque cast of gang lords, cops, entrepreneurs, writers,
whores, city officials, and movie stars hip-deep in booze, betrayal, and
murder. I live in Los Angeles, teach U.S. history, and have read
McWilliams, Davis, Starr, not to mention all of the fictioneers that have
painted such vivid portraits of the City of Angels, yet, in the words of the
late, great Spalding Gray, I had to "leave it to a Brit to tell me about my
own history." This is a perfect summer read; Rayner has knocked another
fast pitch out of the park.
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