A Bright and Guilty Place

Brilliant… the nonfiction equivalent of the Raymond Chandler classics [but] utterly truthful, fantastic and new. - Los Angeles Times

A brilliant retelling of Los Angeles history and noir … - The New York Times editors choice

An engrossing account, which features more villainy and skulduggery than can be easily summarised … - Associated Press

You’ll really love A Bright and Guilty Place. - The Washington Post

It’s rich, dense, mesmerising, encyclopaedic … - Paul Greengrass, director

Richard Rayner makes masterful use of his material-sex, murder, corruption, greed, and the invention of noir-to concoct a seething, sinful tale worthy of Raymond Chandler himself. This is narrative nonfiction at its best: meticulously researched, deftly drawn, and more compelling than anything the imagination might dare to conjure. - Karen Abbott, author of Sin in the Second City

A Bright and Guilty Place is a seductively readable knot of intersecting stories about pre-noir Los Angeles. It has an intriguing shape, a spectrum of emotions, beckoning suspense, satisfying inevitability, and a flavour all its own, at once familiar and strange. - Luc Sante, author of Low Life

Thanks to this detailed and cinematic narrative of desperate people in a desperate city, LA the place, LA the novel, and LA the film are fused into a tour de force of LA noir. - Kevin Starr, Unive