LA Times Review of A Bright and Guilty Place - "In his brilliant new book, A Bright and Guilty Place, Richard Rayner has given us, finally and definitively, the nonfiction equivalent of the Raymond Chandler classics that fell like hammer blows in the middle of last century: Farewell, My Lovely, The Long Goodbye, The Big Sleep. Chandler turned fact, the criminal underworld of Depression-era Los Angeles, into fiction, and now Rayner, by a strange Didion-like alchemy, has turned fiction back into fact. Not to say he has dug up the story behind the story, as a reporter might profile the real white whale, but that he has run the world of Chandler through the machine a second time, the result being utterly truthful, fantastic and new."
Richard Rayner was born in North of England and educated at Cambridge University. He worked for years as a journalist, and as assistant editor at Time Out magazine in London, and, later, as an editor at the literary magazine Granta. His first book, Los Angeles Without A Map, won various prizes in England, and was later turned into a feature film starring David Tennant, Julie Delpy, Vinessa Shaw and Johnny Depp.
Subsequent books are The Blue Suit, a memoir which won the Esquire non-fiction award in England, and novels entitled The Elephant, Murder Book, The Cloud Sketcher and The Devil’s Wind. His non-fiction book about a Depression era con-man, Drake’s Fortune is currently in development for a movie. A Bright and Guilty Place is his latest non-fiction book and has been optioned by Christopher Nolan.
Rayner currently writes for the New Yorker, and has a monthly books column, Paperback Writers, for the Los Angeles Times. He has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Esquire, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, the Guardian, the London Times, and numerous other publications. He lives in Los Angeles and is a lifelong supporter of Manchester United.
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