focused way and to this man, i kind of a lot. ..

which is to say, bit savitt ascendent sublette where is here i thk especially in this town, the expectation is that you either right four newspaper howard kohr y write more hopefully for books or tv, or you can be this other kind of tv or fellowship, or you can be this other kind of alien species in l.a. who is the book writer. [laughter] and you get kind of lo that balefully by these people who are earning a gazillion times more money then you are. and his sort of say, oh well, i guess you write too. [laughter] >> then you become the book writer who writes books about los angeles or not exclushvely but a number of your books have been about los angeles. so, i guess i am interested in sort of, you tch on it in the last chapter of this book which is a personal note for you

contextualized what this story means for ou, and talk about your early experiences of l.a., some of which i think are coming out in l.a. without a map and sort of how you kind of got almo seduced ainst you will buy los angeles. i wonder if you can talk a little bit about the mysterious allure of the city. >> right, my wife and i have lid here now for 18 years and our kids were born in santa monica, so they are from los angeles. i have never been quite able to explain to myself what the nature of my connection to the place is, which is why i think i have gone on writing and writing about it but i know the connection is powerful and has changed, and that like a lot of people when i first came here, which was in the early '80s, just bore the olympics, or

just around the time of the olymcs, i looked around and thought, this place is so great. everybody is so up for it and so not like london. it is thou not like bradford, and i am going to come here and just have a terrific time, and i did. and we came to live here at the beginning of the '90s, and then this wasne it already had this period of time working for grantor in the rodney king riots kicked off. and, bill called me from london and said, get yourself out on th streets. [laughter] and i said bill, the want me to get killed? he said no, but injured would be good. [laughter] and so, i did and i wrote this story for grander about the riots that was published in a lot of places and indeed, the

wonderfully put it in one of your anthologies, and that led to getting a lot of digs for the "new york times" magazine, and they put it together that because i had this what americans that erroneously perceived as this charming english persona. >> it is the accent. >> i got senton tthese kinds of situations with the institutions and the first institution was the lapd, and the "new york tis" magazine in that way, that grand way they do, they say richard we want you to go and write about the the back of police cars for three monthsnd decide whether what willie williams is doing can work. so, joe rodriguez, the photographer and i did just that and we spent a lot o time

unsurprisingly, observing that the lapd wast going to change so much after the rodney king riots. we are getting to know a lot of cops and the photographer was this tough peurto rican guy and one of the cops we got to know was this black homicide detective called cedric wilder, who was then a subdued and he had been watching us for several days. cedric said, i figured it out, what you guyare doing. it is good cop, bad cop. [laughter] he said but there is a twist. people think richard is the good cop. and really he is the bad cop. havinghese experiences of writing about the riots and writing about the lapdade me feel very differently about the city. i started to see its this

functionaly, and i really enjoyethe fact that i saw it in a darker way and began to explain itself better to me, and thenover a period of time, and this is really what the source, what this book has narratives that are laid on top of it and it is very kind of specific about the period of time that it is covering in t stories that it i telling, but one of the things it is trying to do or the thing that is most meaningful to me that it is trying to do is to explain to myself why it is that i feel that this is such a dark ace in so many ways, and how bad feeling has evolvedhrough history. and, gwinnett crystallize, and the argument in the book, whether it is right or not that that feeling, let's call it

forhe sake of argument, crystallized in los angeles as the boom years of the 20's turned into the early years of the depression. >> one of e this that is interesting about this book and also about it in line with their other itings about los angeles is that deeply on the one hand with the glamour and then you see sort of the sordidness underneath and that is one of the things that seems to me to be one of the routes that comes out here in terms of mulhullen and the dam, in terms of doheny and the murder of his son, in terms of even the central, how much we want to gi away, but the central sort of events at the heart of the book. i will let you give that ay. i think we willee pictures that a certain point butt is all about illusion onhe one hand, appearance on the one hand and this much more, much darker more complicated thing that is

happening underneath d it has thpower and who has the access and how they get it. >> right, the central story of the bk really concerns some this, he is such an angeleno prototype. [laughter] that is the former chief of the lapd,. edgar davisnd there is also a wonderful shot you will see at some point where he is leading, he was a crack marksmen and the lapd pistol shooting team was constantly winning the world championships which was one of davis' bacon stearns. in anyway ere isnd i shot that will come u at some point of davis organizing a turkey shoot so you see these lapd guys blazing away at a couple of help lister keys. the central of the story is about this guy called dave clark and as i piece together the way

in which he was cnect to many of the other stories better in the book, i realized that he was convincedn some way a symbol f me of what l.a. is, and so he was this guy, very handsome, looked lik clark ble, tall, slim, at an, had a very pretty wife and he fought in world war i, was aly here come the came out of world war i-- he had grown up around downtown, went to usc. he didn't actually graduated in law, but took the california bar before doing that, which was kind of more routina then, and went to wor for a fm, a downtown firm which primarily represented oil interests from-- called wellborne, wellborne, and

wellborne. clark, he wanted the fast-track. he mary debary clements girl who was the daughteof a famous new york judge, he went to work for the d.a.'s office in 1926. soon before, fits became the a in an attempt to rorm the civic corruption, the city process that wld really go on throughout the 30's and some would argue way, way beyond that, clark was a prosecutor involved in these high-profile cases, busting gangsters. he was involved in a big case wi the movie star, claraow and then himself in 1931 was put on trial for double murder, have been rubbed out then head of the l.a. underworld. so it is really like a michael

corley on the story of this guy, for reasons that are still serious to me to some extent, just got seduced by the darker side of himrelf and also something to do with wanting it all too fast,. >> in the book you talk about this but it reflects back to what you were talking about before. what about this story is so quintessentially los angeles? you say as you are doing research in piecing together the information clark kept coming up and have these connections everywhere. u were loing for ways to explore this moment where l.a.'s adult personality let's say catalyze. what was it about clark that made him so representative and what is itxactlye represented about it? >> he was so glamorous.

he was very well cnected. he was moving between tse different worlds, which seemed not to be connected but in fact are, so the world of l.a. law, the world of downtown power, the world of hollywood celebrities, and the world of the l.a. and the underworld, the gambling and bootlegging and prostitution and their rackets. and the tightness of the connection between those elements and cla's particular character, which had a real kind of hard gina to it so that he was very brilliant, very suave, varied governor and really hard to read. e scariest thing abo him is that after he was arresd for

the double shootg, being a lawyer he had the presence of mind to make no statements to any legal ahority for two months and i just thought well, wow, that someone could actually kind of be able to hold themselves together with that sort of power. >> he actually says to the press of one point i have been on enough of these cases and seen people essentially hang themselves by saying i'm not going to say anything. >> he was self aware and a very modern character in that way, and as i say, that fell to me that it was something typically li l.a.. >> now, the other thing, one of the of the things that is interesting about the cases, it is a hugcase that you described at one point is the o.j. simpson trial of its te and yet, it is sort of lost history in som sense.

i had not known about thicase uftil i read the book. we can pull the roman siegman about it. what, why do you think that is? what you think is the nature of l. and its relationship to its history that these big events in a particular moment and of being glossed over or send it over in some way? >> right, i think they get forgotten because other os come along. [laughter] and that's thehat was fascinating in looking at the clark murder tals, there were two, because the first one was a hung jury which is much more frequent that there. bats, it was huge and we are talking about a time when l.a. head ten newspapers, and morning

editions, evening editions, extra editions, and this constant procession oprim with these wonderful writers, cranking out like just give me a copy of james l. repost netbook but these guys roads i that way. it is really tense, hardboil vivid way and it was as if the town was demonic and in the same way the town has gone on demanding those huge celebrity trials, these huge celebrity events, where crime and fame and sex andower all mixed together, and then once one has happened, it is the nate of this place, it gets forgotten about because there is another one. and, then there is another one and then there is another one

and we see the kind of pattern of these kinds of crimes in defense, just replicate themselves throughout. there are these great anthologies of l.a. true crime, crg rice, the mystery writer did one back in the 40's and there is that good anthology, fallen angels, which catalogs the 20 or 30 of the great l.a. crimes, and y know in the case of clark, no one had really ever put it together before, which was st amazing that, why was no one interesd in doing this? to months before he had shot them in a room in hollywood, he had been up in court with her, and tually prosecuting daisy devault, who was klehr's

secretary, who was blackmailg clara bow for $150,000 a klehr vote did not give heard the $150,000 since she was going to go to the press and explain to them how clara had been banging john wayne, had been marrying morrison. >> who with the time-- >> some say had banked the entire usc football tea she was inaugural, clara, can klehr a being sponte refused to let daisy devault lack mal her. the prosecution was then carried out by clark, and it cracked clara's career because the information d come out in the head of paramount to make his career of the discovery of this bergland girl, dropped her like ato.

no one had never reallyooked into clark's life in of to notice that two months before he shot these to do this, he had been involved in this others liberty trialed but on the other side of the fence, and i thought well, who is the character, who was this guy who could on the one hand be doing that and pulling that off, by the clara both trialed a so soon afterwards he was up to his neck in somenkle of the racks, which is caused him toe in an argument, in a small, heavily defended room in hollywood and shoed to people. >> i wonder how much you think, we also talked about the notion that l.a. it's the city is very much like a small town. louis adamat called that the enormous city. richard milter has called it the biggt hit town and all the heck world.

[laughter] a to subscribe to that you? it does seem to me a city where all of those separate circles of power could come together because there aren't that many people running the show but i am curious about your take on that and how much at had to do with the story of a guy like clark or even the story of l.a. maturing in that perioin the late '20s and early '30's. >> i think that is certainly true. we have to kind of stopped for a moment and think about what los angeles actually was in 1920. itas a city with a population of about 500,000. through the 20's, that population would grow to about 1.2 million. we are talking about, the world at that point, and the city that was controlled and had indeed been callednto being by

a very small cadre of powerful men, who were concerned to make money by making the city grow. >> this go back really to the-- >> and, so that we all know the story, that los angeles doesn't have any water, so henry huntington in harry chandler in mulhullen end a group of others co up a plan that we are going to take the money, take the water om the river valley. that set in motion in t '70s and brought into completion in 1913 when the water arrives. >> though also it is preceded they buy at the same, the same consortium buys the same san fernando valley. so the irrigated with the water

they have stolen. >> the water arrives in the san fernando valley and thus making for these people some say three-leggedillion dollars, something like that, and then l.a. has the ecological ability to grow, and they encoure people to come here, to buy the land that they have irrigated, that has suddenly become much more valuable than it was before. but, the how about the place is still downtown, and downtown i in 1920, was still looking at that so there's not really much between downtown santa monica. hollywood is starting to grow up. beverly hills is stting to grow up, but you know if you drove do wells sure from downtown to the ocean in 1920 were going to see a lot of orange groves, a lot of bean fields and stuff like that and

not much in between, so we are talking t a place that is, i know if it was cut out of my copy when i write this, that it seems to be an aost science fictional environment. in de soto and imaginably different and distant, a the power is in t@e hands of amall group of people. mike davis has that wonderful line, powe lines, and it seems to me that that is still, it was definitely true about l. than that the power lines were narrow and interconnected and seems to me to be still true to some extent, that it waa place, because it had been small, was controlled by a small number of people and as it became big, which it did very quickly, was still controlled by a lot of the same groups of guys, although you have the arrival of the movie industry, which then created its own separate power

line to the kind of late tes and twenties and into the 30's and of course beyond that to now. >> ride come and then you also have, i guess the movie business was westside jewish power and orla trysten the money ierest for downtown was power so you had some kind of computing power structures there but they all had to play together in a certain sense. >> the major power structure in the 20's was oil, and somewhere back there, you would come up short of the signal hill oilfields, the area by lon beach with just a pepper pot of oil rigs and one of the most extraordinary statistics i have in the book is through the 1920's, los angeles created, not quite the right word, but brought up 25% of the world's oil. it is amazing.

is one of thoseeally, who knew, kind of thisut still haney, who had fst found oil in the late 1880s indeed lowbred hattar pits was athe time the richest man in america briefly in the early 1920's. he made the first kind of nugget of his fortu to the discovery oil in l.a. but therealized that actually the way to get real, really rich was to control the entire oi production of mexico, which is basically what doheny did from about 1905 until the time of the mexica revolution, so yes, the power lines were centered around the boosters, the landowners,

the "l.a. times" enormously powerful, and then the oil, which at that time doheny money was establiment l.a.'s money in other words it was ten or 15 years old, which back then seemed like or indeed was a very long period of time in the city's history, and then we have-- i was talking to the wonderful writer, d.j. willging about their-- the emigrant, the different immigrant influx so you mentioned adamic earlier. this slovenians guy who came to los angeles in the late teens and was the city's first boswell, and he wrote a wonderful book which is almost impossible to find and long out of print called laughing in the

jungles. >> laughing in theungle. >> which is a series of essays and kind of diarie that he had writn of his early experiences in los angeles, anti-says it is a city full of old people. and in the early 1920's that was true. it was the people who had come from the midwest and had been encourag to ce here with their retirement money because it was warm, and you could kind of guy and comfort and warmth, listening to some person on the radio. in some way, los angeles carved hollywood into being because it needed young people to come here, so it has this kind of flip idea of the usual explanations, which is that the

filmmakers came here because as lawrence wechsler says, tre is 18 times more light or whatever it is. but this lovely idea that we actually, in order to again, for the city to continue torow, it needed younger people. >> it is a kind of empiric vision. [laughter] but it is interesting because they think the other thing that you gethat in the book and kerry mcwilliams certaly and nathaniel west road about it and acid dust and they have the locust is the emptiness of that, that midwestern retirees live, that there was no spiritual or civic war, noense of connection so there was this enormous kd of boredom and on focusing to it, and youort of talk about that, theoots or

the role othat and the roots of some of the kinds of horrific and unimaginable cmes. u tal about the women who had her lover in a cage for 13 years in the attic and find the letter out so he could kill her husband. >> that is only in l.a. kind of event. >> she was not the tiger. >> no, that is a different one, tiger phillips, the one to beat to death her, the rival for her lover with alaw hammer. bu kerry mcwilliams who wrote i think the greatkbout the early history of los angeles, said proudly wrote proudly, los angeles has the bt murders ever. [laughter]

and, i think we still do and in the 20's there was this parade of them, so-- the lover locked away upstairs until he was allod to come down and kill her husband, clearly this is feeding into a james king kaine scenario. phillips, who is-kied the woman with a clawammer, escapes from jail, goes down to one the is, is tracke down by this wonderful sigir the reports to the examiner called morris lapine, who gets to her hotel in honduras and says his rationale for making her come back here so he can get a story is, who are you reay? are you going to hide away here or are you really atiger phillips, in which hazy will come back with me to los angeles

and greet the popping flashbulbs and enjoy the same that you will undoubtedly have. [laughter] she came back. [laughter] >> i am ready for-- [laughter] >> and the hickman murder, the guy to kidnapped the little girl, and thought this was the time when peoe were pre-lindh burd and win kidnapping seen this something that people could get away with so this girl then was holding the family for ransom, and showed up at the meeting with the girl's father. this is an awful story and by this time he had killed the girl, but he had sewn her eyelids up to the school so it looked as if she was in the car with her eyes open, a life. when he wa finally caught, and

said ims famous as leopold. .. was on my way back into the restaurant to collect the gun that are left othe table. that is his alib the town needs these events.

wh i was trying to do was try to get at why it is that that generation is in the depression. obviously about raymond chandler, they were all year, they were fuelled to create this pe of writing, not just outside the development of style, there was a lot more written than we now assume. back from that, into the real events that may have actually caused them to wri what they did. i almost fell off my chr.

chandl was no great burden to have to do that because he mains in many ways the greatest poet of what i am talking about. a throwaway in one of the early short stories actually described what was clearly the day. >> that was fascinating. as a reader, reading chandler or any of those riders o the 30s. they all came outhe same year. they all share a hardboiled point of view, great risk at the beginning, where they talk about the letter from a landlord

requiring that he went tsleep, could have come right out of chandler. there had to be something in the air. it wasn't that chandler was creating it any more than hannibal was creating more. it wasn't style. it had to be aesponse -- >> that is jerry true. >> y talk aut writers who feel different kinds -- >> in 1939 i don't think they couldave known each other. >> i have never seen a point of intersection. >> it is hard to imagine they uld have known each other.

chandl, the weirdness of his life in los angeles. he was older than them and already sort of more disappointed figure in 1939. that is wh he was starting to achieve is studying. and wert was really mucwoe, glamorous figure, connected, probably for all this -- >>ilson -- friendly wh wilson. >> that bill is so -- does have

that night marage -- and 9 marriage quality which is just fraught with what we are talking about, we stand on the street in blazing sunlight. there is a picture of dave clark. it says to me everything that the book is about, the brilliant, hard light of los angeles, the shadow, and when you justeel at 2:00 in the afternoon that aul emptiness, what am i going to do? which is a feeling that i have never quite had in any other city in the world in the way i expericed it here, a scary,

almost sort of despair in feelg that i never had in london. new york or helsinki or other ples, there seems to be nothing to do here. los angeles seems so oppressive and so awful, i think this isn perience, these moment shattering, sunlit horror that rises throughout the history has had. >> the other side of it that i want to talk about, lesley white represents the other side. he is the opposing goal of the story to david clarke. it really was a land of opportunity in a lot ofays. financially certainly, but also in terms of possibilities like

choices, opportunities of things to do. this guy started out as a photographer. you can tell his story a little bit but ended up being everywhere of importance during this five or six year period, all sorts of different roles. >> the book compare tse two guys. he is the light/dark. why this guy ce out of canada originally and move to ventura county, he had a succession, worked in a gas station, a couple of law enforcement jobs and by 1928 was a photoapher in ventura, and mulholland, having realized the water taken out was not goingo be enough.

there were two dams, the hollywd reservoir dam, and another one -- i have trouble stammering this -- just east of ventura. one night, this dam gave out, a wall of water two hundred feet high--the story is like the tinic, phis wall of water 200 feet high is released and spends three hours beating its way to the ocean. as it does that, imagine when a dam bursts, it is happening fast, this wall of water, t moment of the original release, is moving 18 miles an hour. is not that fast.

people are out racing it trying to warn people down the lley that disaster is about to hit. so it sweeps down to the ocean. many people are killed, nobody really knows, lot of people were immigrant farmers who were, then as now, here illegally, nobody was interested, the death figure is between 400, depending on the talked to. it was hea a bit vaguely. he fli out in the airplane, he

writes about seeing,s dawn breaks, below, realizing human figures, either dead or still struggling to survive, this is ill a hot topic in ventura county today because l.a. county water kled ventura county people. th first fought in tthought in of the powers that be was lawsuits. they helpedompile a citizen's report, so he hado take more pictures of bodies as they were found, at an evidentiary component of a report that was put together. i tracked down these pictures, none of them had ever been published. i was one of the very first

people ever to try to find them. some of the bodies were found the next day. it was as if someone had just gone to sleep. some of the bodies wereound three months later. then you are talking about waxworks or stuff. these picre had never been seen by anybody. we can't publish those! they were too harrowing. as a resultf this work, white's lung hemorrhage.

he came to los angeles for his health and because of his friend knicks experiee got a job in the a's office. it was recreating the district attorney's investigative unit. he got a job as a forensic guy. this is when his life starts to intersect withclark's, they are working in the hall of justice. the works the murder/suicide case. he had known in ventura a well-known ventura county lawyer who he met again in los angeles who said you have this great material, magazines -- >> a classic moment, he had a crisis where he didn't want to dot anymore, it is great

material. >> he is woing for the the a's office, starts to turn himself in to a pulp fiction writer. he wrote a very excellent memoir which carried these references. his wife memoir, me, detective, early police procedurals, he was a gung-ho, excitable kind of writer who had a real knack for storytelling. he is one of these guys who went on reinventing himself. he bame a writer, he was a crime wrer. he knew that he became a gossip

magazineeditor. a historical romance writer. this is my favorite detail, having raised a family on a farm or a second family that he had, he becomes the edir of the national model railw associion. >> a classic l a story. >> this raises one last question, two related questions, this was really in some ways, what you are uncovering is shadow history of los angele when you think o the literature of elway, all these books, you talk about a lot of them here,

whether it is white uff, long out of print, and no one has seen in a long time, were the flutter of an eyelid, one of my favorite books nobody has ever read, great books, really fascinating and illuminating windows on the culture of the city in their moment and now. basically for all intents and purposes, don't exist. at the same tie it is very much like the culture we are living in now. even the description of valet at that te, a time of economic disaster, massive unemployment, ethnic tensions, immigration issu corruption, goverent that is no doing what it is supposed to be doing and in some ways even when you describe the newspapers, the way the newspapers worked, that was the emerging technology, those newspapers function -- you could follow the michael jackson funeral motorcade yesterday on the internet on various web sites point by point as they

were updating constantly. it feels like there are all these echoes back and forth. on the one hand it is shadow history but it is profoundly relevant. i want to get your sense of that, your thoughts on how that works and whether that is really quintessentially los angeles, loss of history where this history of forgetting notion, more so than in other cities, or do y think we have entered into a culture read that is more broadly -- the culture of forgetting has taken over. >> the latter point may be true. the norman fine -- norman kline's beautiful book history of forgetting, the history of los angeles, part of the city's dna, about how we seize on these

moments and transform them into public spectacle, and instantly dispose of them, that seems to me to be something that is still true, and it may be that what has happened is the rest of the world started behaving like that also. one of los angeles's great gifts to civilization. that could be the case. >> let's turn it over to you for a little bit. we have microphones? raise your hand. someone with a microphone will come -- we have one in the front row. >> there is your picture. >> that clock goes to the left. this was a gangster. you see him shortly after being involved in a fight at a cafe --

trying to extend his wrongdoing and removed his shirt. his shirt had too much blood on . he has quite a bit anyway. this gangster was the man who clark eventually runs out. >> there is a hand up over ther >> i would like to hear about your research process, what are the archival sources in the 20s and 30s? >> they are all over. it depends on -- i have done things that ha been archived in different ways, the previous noiction is history this

book in the depression era where there was a lot of prison records and iot tho through a friend or someone who became a friend of mine in e national archives. these people have invaluable resours when you find them. a lot of this, there were trial transcripts, just a lot of going through -- it seems to be what this book is is an attempt to connect 7 dots that no one ever bothered to try to connect before. i did a lot of constructing a very detailed timeline, b looking at newspaper stories, even with the clark murder at that moment in the timeline, wherwas he at that moment?

what did the illustrated news say, what did the exaner say, what did the express say about it? and then comparinghat with his own testimony,eaved togeth a narrative. i try to looat as much, i love having old photos in my hands, old documents, there's something very exciting about tha process. you can just go on and on. there's never a end to research and realize, my god, i should have actually done that extra trip somewhere else. but eventually the moment comes when you have got the narrative and the writing takes over and

the research starts. this isery involved but fun. >> you mention a lot of great books that were published in e 1930s that are out of print. i am curious if you are familiar with one cald los angeles which had a effect on what you are writing about because it has to do with a lot of that period, the beginnings of los angeles. >> i think that is a wonderful book, especially in its telling of the owens river valley story. it is not a favorite of yours. >> it is okay. highlights cedar's telling of that story because it is very

red. >> in new york, a journist to came out and pulled together that book, it had the energy of being written quickly, he realized -- pcs on this amazing stuff that had never been written before. but that superseded quite qukly, i like that book, but it got superseded by the williams book, which there is no question it is better done. >> interting thing about the mcwilliams bgok,ven 60 years later, it came out in6. is completely rightn. >> an ingenious book. we recommend it highly to everyone. ere is a hand up in the back.

>> can youonfirm or deny a story about the food emporium next door to centralarket about 15 years ago, the lady manager and her boyfriend disappeared and were found a few months later ithe meat lker and there had been a city that needed inspection in the process, in the period of time between the disappearance and the discovery? it is rthy of a movie, i think. >> that might be my next book. i am sorry, i don't know anythingbout that. it is gat. do you want to get the guy on the phone? >> since this was in the 20s,

the roaring 20s, we seem to rceive it as decadent and free-flowing and everydhing, was it tempered by this kind of behavior? was tempered in l. during the depression? or have we been crazy for the last eight years? >> it is interesting, throughout the 20s and 30s, that sort of decadence is answered as it always is by a form of puritanism. we came from the ethic that the midwesterners brought with them. the most powerful influences in radio at that time, the evangelists.

mcpherson was essentially selling a bizarre version through god, the other 20s, bob schuler ud radio as a political tool. he was one of the first people to do that. what he sees upon was the fact that wt everybody -- what is flock wanted to hear about was how awful d decadent -- he up the flag for the values we represented, the true american values that tension has always been a part of what he was. to some extent. and im not sure whether that behavior changes through ecomic changes i don't think

it really does. attention runs beneath, whether were in arosperous moment or not. >> the gentleman in thefront. >> i don't really kn anything about l a history and i find it interesting that a d a would end up killing a couple banks this. >> assistant da. >> all right. whatever happened to him? did he get away with it since they regained is? >> that is a goodquestion, he did get away with it, he got away with it on self-defense. this is dave clark, the main character in the book. he hd his nerves, never told his tale, a legal procedure was dhfferent then, he could arrive in courp on the day when everybody knew he was going to tell the story, having never uttered a breath of it, people

don't really believe him, he naged to get a lot of women on the jury, so he gets acquitted ter the first trial, it is a hung jury. he becomes a mouthpiece, he becomes in effect a gangster's lawyer, he works like guy mcaf. clark's career prospers through th40s with mcafee as a model for eddie mars. the sad tale about clark is his glamorous life spirals down into the 50s, and he is still lawyer but he is staying with a friend. it is veterans weekend, they both got blasted, this is a guy who is that u.s. c in the 20s

and 50s and clark wakes up his friend and says i thini i just killed your wife. and the wife had got involved while her husband had passed out, she had been accusing clark of mooching off of them, clark reached for a shotgunn a rage and blew her away. at that moment20 years on, everybody realizes clark murdered crawford the tragic thing about th story is his own wife, who byhen had divorced him, d nancy, the pretty lady standing by in the jail cell, alway held a candle for clark from nancy's granddaughter even when they were separated. ..