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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.

True Crime Blogroll

Charles F. Lummis

Death at the Lummis House

Submitted by larry on Fri, 2006-08-25 09:21.

Aug. 25, 1907
Los Angeles

A 20-year-old Pueblo Indian from New Mexico was shot to death at the home of City Librarian Charles F. Lummis in a fight with a houseguest that began over a garden hose.

The gunman, Francisco Amante, 51, described as a Spanish minstrel who has been Lummis