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On a Bright and Guilty Place
A CONVERSATION WITH RICHARD RAYNER, AUTHOR
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Crime fiction and crime itself are a huge part of this book. Have these always been fascinations of yours? |
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Bluntly, yes. One of my very first memories is of a policeman arriving at our family’s house in Yorkshire in the North of England, asking for my father. At various times in his life he was a crook in a minor, white collar sort of way. When I was eleven he embezzled a large sum of money and vanished, not reappearing until many years later. By which time I’d already read Dostoyevsky, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and was beginning to think that criminality is a hidden, or not so hidden, part of all of us. The late Patricia Highsmith explored that so well in her work. I wrote about my father in a memoir, ‘The Blue Suit’, which then led to a historical reportage about a Depression-era con man, ‘Drake’s Fortune’. I’ve reported on crime, and cops, for the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times. Crime is more than a fascination for me, I suppose – it’s a way I think about character and the world. Criminals always have their reasons – like Dave Clark in ‘A Bright and Guilty Place’.
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You were originally born in the UK but have lived in Los Angeles for nearly twenty years now. Do you think that seeing LA from an ex-pat’s point of view allowed you to observe things about the city that you might not have if you’d been born here? |
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That’s probably true. When I first arrived in L.A. – which was even before I came to live here with my wife, when I was committing journalism for magazines and newspapers back in London – I saw everything in such a fresh and pop-eyed kind of way. The palm trees had hair trees like Rod Stewart! There’s homeboy, handing a gun to one of his crew in a car on the freeway! Cool!!! I noticed everything. Now I feel very different about the city, having been here for so long. I’m embedded here in ways I don’t always quite like, and our kids were born here. I’ve become known as ‘an LA guy’ in terms of my work. Yet I don’t feel I belong in the city. This, in turn, is part of what Los Angeles is all about. It’s a city full of strangers, and the story of the generations of expatriates and immigrants within it comprise a large part of LA’s identity. Maybe as someone who wasn’t born here I always see the extremities of the city. It’s both heaven and hell, on the one hand so prosperous and sunny, on the other, so desperate. So much greed, so much poverty. As Bertolt Brecht wrote when he was here, trying, and failing, to get screenplay work: ‘The angels of Los Angeles are tired out with smiling.’ And yet, it’s great!
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How did you go about doing your research for A Bright and Guilty Place? Was there anything in the course of researching that really surprised you? |
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I love doing research. Research, for a writer in Britain, tends to mean sitting alone in your room being neurotic and reading lots of books. And of course that’s still a part of my process. Reading books, following leads in footnotes and bibliographies and indexes that lead to other books and scholarly articles, meaning trips to libraries and other institutes of learning, the more labyrinthine the better. I feel like I could go to live in the Charles Young Research Library at UCLA. I think there are some bums and ghosts who do live there! So that’s a part of it. But when I was doing lots of work for the New York Times Magazine I had an editor there – a great guy named Kyle Crichton, hailing from a famous American literary family – who assigned me to stories (about cops, about the military, about illegal immigrants) that meant hitting the streets and cop cars and bases and barrios with my notebook and doing interviews and getting sweaty and dirty and seeing how it all was on the ground. Therefore these days, in writing the books, I try and track down witnesses, relatives, or visit the actual places that featured in the events I’m writing about. All this feeds into the texture. Then there are the court documents. Nothing better than finding boxes full of original trial transcript – a whole sequence of events springs to life for you, always in a different, fresher way. And in the case of ‘A Bright and Guilty Place’ I relied on a lot of newspaper archive. Los Angeles had a dozen or so daily newspapers back in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Lots of different editions every day, each paper with its own style and its own particular angle on each story. Spectacular writing! And some of this stuff has just vanished – no hard copies left, not even microfiche in the great research libraries. A whole vibrant world of print has left little mark on history. There’s a lesson there, I guess, and one of the things I was particularly concerned to try in ‘A Bright and Guilty Place’ was to give a strong taste of that vanished and heroic and sleazy world of 1920s newspapering.
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What in particular about the stories of Leslie White and Dave Clark so interested you and how did these two men first come to your attention? |
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As I wrote the book, I realized I was seeing elements of myself in White and Clark. White is the spunky young guy who turns himself into a writer and makes it through. Clark is the young man of promise who goes wrong, and becomes a crook, a murderer. Yet only a knife edge lay between them. Their destinies were so intertwined, one a mirror image of the other. The movie rights to the book have been bought by Christopher Nolan, the great director who’s done ‘Memento’, ‘The Prestige’, and the two most recent ‘Batman’ films. I’m sure this duality is one of the things that drew him to the book. Certainly, for me, White and Clark are the beating heart of it. Clark had been written about, in a cursory sort of way, in various true crime in LA things. When I realized that the same Dave Clark who shot Charlie Crawford in May 1931 had been, only a few months before, involved in a high-profile trial with the movie star Clara Bow, did I realize, hey, there’s a character here who could fill a book. Nobody had made that connection in a specific way before. Then I found further reference to Clark in Leslie White’s memoir, ‘Me, Detective’, and realized that these two guys had known each other. It was reading about, and around, Raymond Chandler, that led me to White. White’s ‘Me, Detective’ so clearly influenced Chandler in the 1930s.
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What do you believe has been the lasting impact of L.A.’s legacy of organized crime and corruption? Do you think the California of today is markedly different than the one you discuss in the book? |
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In the 1920s Los Angeles still acted and thought like the small town it had been only a decade before. In some ways this is still true. That’s the say, the lines of power still cluster around some of the same entities that they did back then. City Hall, of course. The law. USC is still very important in the way the town works and thinks. Hollywood, which, for all its mutations, still has the same money-driven concerns that it did back then. The LAPD has struggled with its legacy of violence and corruption ever since the time I describe. It’s always been a much smaller police force than that of, say, New York, and therefore small cancers of rottenness can grow. Although I think that the scandal that surrounded, for example, the Rampart division in recent years was exaggerated. Yes, cops do bad things sometimes; but I’ve seen LA beat cops do great and selfless and brave things too. The corruption that I write about in ‘A Bright and Guilty Place’ happened whern political fixers got themselves between City Hall and the cops and the crooks. That led to something called the ‘Los Angeles System’, which was slowly taken over by the Eastern mob in the 1930s. The beginnings of that struggle, and the ascension of Guy McAfee over Charlie Crawford, are what dragged Dave Clark down, because he got involved with it. Corruption in that Lincoln Steffens way doesn’t seem to exist here anymore, although the relationship between crime, cops, and politics always remains close, as the State of Illinois goes on proving. California is today very much markedly different. It’s a land of innocence betrayed, I think – and yet the promise is still there, drawing different groups who have, nonetheless, the same aspirations as those who arrived 100, 50, 20 years ago. It’s American’s place for transformation, however much it morphs.
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The rise of evangelism and the rise in crime rate in the 1930’s happen in tandem in the book, do you see the two things as inextricably linked? |
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I think they’re inextricably linked through their importance in the history of Los Angeles at this particular time. The 1920s were the decade that defined L.A. It was the fastest growing city in the world at that time, with the population more than doubling through the decade, rising from 500,000 or so to more than 1.2m. The city was exploding. Buildings shooting up everywhere. Immigrants arriving from all over American, drawn by Hollywood and the promise of sunshine. Those who came from the Midwest brought with them their core protestant values. So when early radio got going in the mid-1920s it was a natural for the evangelists, who could get their message out to the ‘folks’ in a much wider way. Aimee Semple Macpherson sold love. Her rival the Rev Bob Shuler sold gossip, the dish on Hollywood and political and criminal corruption, which was endemic, although in a controlled way. Scandal, for the evangelist Shuler, was a way of bolstering and securing his power base.
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One of the stories in the book involves a movie starlet in a criminal trial who ends up getting excoriated for the details of her personal life, something we see pretty regularly in the press nowadays. Do you think stars who get embroiled in scandalous legal battles in the modern era have it better or worse than Clara Bow, the embattled actress from A Bright and Guilty Place? |
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In 1929 and 1930 Clara Bow was the biggest box office draw in the world, bigger than Chaplin, bigger than Harold Lloyd, bigger than Mary Pickford. She was Hollywood’s hottest hot hot hot star, and its most notorious. She liked men. She liked to fool around. And she wasn’t part of the Hollywood class system: she was shunned by the likes of Chaplin because she never really bothered to disguise where she came from – the Brooklyn gutter. She was a brave and reckless woman. Still, it’s staggering to consider that, as a result of the case she brought against Daisy DeVoe, a case that was fought in court by Dave Clark, her career was completely destroyed, finished within months. Paramount, and her boss and one-time lover B.P. Schulberg, dropped her like a stone. The arrival of talkies contributed to her demise, but, more than that was the fact that she became just too troublesome. The difference now – when the media glare is even more intense – would be that Clara Bow would be surrounded by agents and lawyers and managers intent on maintaining her value, because she could still earn money for them. None of today’s so-called bad girls – Lindsay Lohan, say – will vanish from the face of celebrity, because they still have monetary worth. With Bow it was, hey, she’s gone - on to the next! And it happened so quickly. The real and groundbreaking business genius of Chaplin and Mary Pickford was that they saw exactly what the studio system could do to them and protected themselves against it. So I think that today’s stars have it worse, and yet so much better. In today’s world Clara’s minders would have made sure that even the bad publicity worked finally in her favor. She was pre-spin and got washed out – horribly, and unfairly.
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Do you think there is a parallel to be drawn between the Dave Clark case that you discuss in the book and some of the recent political scandals we’ve seen, those involving Elliott Spitzer and John Edwards for example, where an incredible level of hubris leads to a spectacular moral downfall? |
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It comes down to a fascinating issue – why do people of bright promise wind up committing actions that they must know, at some level, will destroy them? Answer: they can’t help or stop themselves. But why? There we enter matters of perhaps unfathomable psychology that it is nonetheless the writer’s job to try to fathom. Pride, hubris, does indeed often come into it. Certain people have such a sense of their own power and glamour that they seem to think they’re above being caught. In the case of Dave Clark, I think that he was representative of Los Angeles (he was a native, born and raised here, educated at USC) in that he felt he was entitled to a great and golden career, and he was going to have one, but, fatally, he wanted it all a little too quickly. He saw less talented people achieving more and was tempted therefore to take short-cuts. He was drawn into the world of the rackets, step by step, until those murky waters rose around his neck and he found himself in a small Hollywood office, armed with a gun, in a situation where the only way out seemed to be to shoot two men. What a trajectory! He’s like Michael Corleone, the Al Pacino character in ‘The Godfather’.
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What’s next for you? |
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I want to get another non-fiction historical book on the go. Various ideas are floating around in my head, all of them relating to crime in one way or another. I seem to be stuck with that subject, or it’s stuck with me. So hopefully on of those will become the next thing. In these last couple of years I’ve also been working on some fiction, a sequence of comic short stories that involve two characters, Vickery and Muldoon. Vickery is a struggling writer in Los Angeles; Muldoon is his oldest friend, now a fabulously successful movie director who swans in and out of town from time to time, disrupting Vickery’s life in ways hopeful and despairing and funny. The model here is Scott Fitzgerald’s failed hack Pat Hobby, and this is another way for me to look at L.A. I do indeed feel myself to be struggling, sometimes, and I do have a great old friend (not Chris Nolan, but another guy) who’s now a big-name director, though in the stories I’m not exactly Vickery and he’s not quite Muldoon. They’re fiction, they’re exaggerated, and fun and hopefully resonant. Some have already been published in the New Yorker and elsewhere.
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