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.