Rayner, Richard

This book is a captivating chronicle of how the City of Angels lost its soul. In the 1920s 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 LA's reckless optimism with the 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 naive young photographer who lands a job as a crime-scene investigator in the LA 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," featuring 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 LA'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 LA, 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 the water from the Owens River Valley that let LA grow; the Teapot Dome scandal, which brought shame to President Harding; and the emergence of crime writers like Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, who helped mythologize LA. In Rayner's hands, the ballad of Dave Clark is the story of the coming of age of a great American city. - Jacket flap.

Over the course of twenty years, from 1914 to 1933, Oscar Hartzell conned millions of dollars from tens of thousands of trusting, innocent people. And when he was caught, they gave him more.There are no folk heroes more all-American than con artists. Though we may openly condemn them, deep down we admire their brazen bravado, their cleverness, their shrewd understanding of how to rouse ambition and greed in their hapless victims. They offer the American dream on the quick, and, after all, don't suckers get what they deserve?Oscar Hartzell was born in 1876, on the Illinois prairie. Rising from humble origins, he worked hard as a farmer and then as a rancher on the grand scale in Iowa and Texas. But his flair for business didn't match his ambition, and his dream of success foundered. A bankrupt, he was in his late thirties when in 1915 he met a couple who promised to turn his mother's six thousand dollars into six million by delivering to her a share of the long-lost fortune of Sir Francis Drake. Hartzell joined their operation, apparently believing in it, before realizing it was a fraud and then boldly stealing it from under their noses and turning it into an enterprise that netted him millions. Hartzell moved to London, out of the reach of frustrated American lawmen, restyling himself as an English aristocrat. While living a life of hedonistic grandeur, he played the hayseed for the folks back home, selling as many as a hundred thousand Midwesterners on a get-rich-quick scheme that seemed every bit as reasonable as the wildly speculative investments being touted on Wall Street. The year 1929 came, the stock market crashed -- and then his life began to get very strange. His victims turned him into a messiah.The extraordinary story of Oscar Hartzell has been all but forgotten and never told in full until now. Richard Rayner employs a wealth of original research and previously unseen documents to re-create a saga that stands out both for the sheer longevity and outrageousness of Hartzell's con and for what its amazing twists and turns tell us about the tens of thousands of solid American citizens who, crushed by the Depression, believed to death in the most outrageous of frauds.From the Hardcover edition.

The Blue Suit is a story about the absence of identity. Born in West Yorkshire, Richard Rayner had a peripatetic childhood, until, it seemed, he found some sense of place when he attended Cambridge University in the mid-1970s. But far from affording him security, Cambridge, combined with the study of philosophy and an obsession with books, was the setting for the start of a bizarre life of crime. Mounting debts propelled Rayner into a series of frightening, foolish, and hilarious adventures. Seventeen years later, trying to come to terms with his nefarious history, Rayner is forced to reconcile his relationships with his parents, especially his father, who himself resembles a John le Carre character. In so doing, he inspects with conflicting emotions - anger, sadness, embarrassment, humiliation, a dotty pride - his adolescence and the "after-images of a used-up past" that haunt him, and he touches truths that many of us would rather not acknowledge. Entertaining and furiously written with a sardonic air of grace, The Blue Suit is both tragic and comic, an inspired act of retrieval.