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For a shockingly reasonable fee, Crimebo the Crime Clown will come to your party and read from his Big Book of Terrible Crimes about all the ghastly things that happened on your special day. Click the contact link for more info.

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Gorgeously lurid... with an introduction from James Ellroy.

Collection of photos from the tabloid Herald-Express.

A deft fictional imagining of the dark circumstances behind starlet Jean Spangler's unsolved 1949 disappearance.

Widely recognized as the best non-fiction book written about Southern California for the period 1920s through the 1940s... packed with fascinating material on the region and its galaxy of personalities.

an exceptionally well-done resource, and a welcome addition to the shelves of any Los Angelaphile, scholar, or visitor who seeks a self-guided tour.

An elegant, A to Z compendium of Marlowe's ever-more-relevant observations about crime, women, work, sex, good, evil, and life in the big city.

In 1949, photographer Don Normark walked up into the hills of Los Angeles, looking for a good view. Instead, he found Chavez Ravine, a ramshackle Mexican-American neighborhood tucked away in Elysian Park like a "poor man's Shangri-la." Enchanted, he stayed for a year amidst the wild roses, tin roofs, and wandering goats of this uniquely intact rural community on the city's outskirts. Accepted by the residents, Normark was able to photograph a life that, though bowed down by poverty, was lived fully, openly, and joyfully.

"Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles"

Jim Heimann is the man to see in Hollywood if you are making a movie that is set in Southern California in bygone times--he combines the skills of an archivist, a cultural anthropologist, a designer and a historian, and he knows where to look for a dusty photographic relic that shows what any corner of byway of Los Angeles looked like on a particular day in the past. Heimann's remarkable skill set is put to good use in this beguiling collection of black-and-white photographs that depict the demimonde of Los Angeles from the '20s to the '50s. What the photographer Weegee did for New York in his classic "Naked City," Heimann now does for Los Angeles.

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I just chopped up someone shaped like a cookie...

Submitted by kim on Tue, 2007-06-26 19:17.

Presented for your consideration, a recently unearthed example of the kind of disgusting collaborative work that Kim and Nathan did when they didn't have laptops at their disposal... a little tidbit we titled "Pee-Nuts." Click to see this mid '90s artifact in all its grim beauty, or don't.

kim's blog
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In Youth is Pleasure

Submitted by nathan on Sun, 2007-07-01 12:48.

...as our buddy Denton Welch would say, and yes, this presumptous palimpsest drips with all the guilty pleasures of whacked-out youth. Some of the pix and the lowercase penning is by our pal, local ne'er-do-well and genius-about-town Eric Kruger, which dates this to 1990 (that's his remarkable image of Sally obsessing over Linus, lower left, next to my rather disturbing deathcamp rendering of Frieda [and her cat]). I'm mostly shocked that we got in the minor characters--like Frieda's cat--plus I drew Snoopy's sleepy brother Spike, upper right, in all his William Burroughs glory...c'mon! Spike? Lives in NEEDLES? Wears a junkie fedora and an opium-laced Fu Manchu moustache? The sociopath is indeed in.

1947project

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I just chopped up someone shaped like a cookie...

In Youth is Pleasure