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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

Oklahoma

A Gruesome First

Submitted by larry on Wed, 2006-12-27 08:39.

Dec. 27, 1907
Henryetta, Okla., by the Associated Press

A little more than a month after Oklahoma achieved statehood, James Garden became a wretched statistic: the first black to be lynched there.

On Dec. 24, Garden went to see liveryman Albert Bates about renting a rig. When Bates refused, Garden accused him of racism, went across the street to get a gun, returned and shot Bates to death.

By nightfall, a group of 100 men stormed the jail, fought off police officers and hanged Garden from a telegraph pole in the center of town, then used his body for target practice, riddling it with bullets.