An exciting addition to the true-crime history of Depression-era LA.
A historian of Los Angeles in the era before World War II explores one of the city’s most famous real-life detectives.
Jenning offers readers a riveting portrait of early-20th-century LA in this biography of detective Harry Raymond, who was described by his contemporaries as “the most feared copper in California.” Raymond’s life provides the author the opportunity to explore the city “through the peephole,” as he puts it; he introduces readers to the web of “vice districts” in LA that served as “a moneymaking industry for just about everybody,” including “cops, councilmen, and mayors.” Raymond arrived there at the age of 21 and would rise through the ranks of the LA Police Department as a key member of the “goon squad” that targeted gangsters and gamblers. Although he’d later serve a stint as the chief of the San Diego Police Department, Raymond never fully cut ties with the City of Angels, continuing to run his own private detective practice in the city. Upon his return to the LAPD in 1933, he resumed his duties with the gangster squad, which eventually led him to investigate systemic corruption in local government and the LAPD itself. By 1938, he’d become a national sensation, helping to bring down a corrupt mayor and nearly two dozen dirty cops, and he ushered in the “migration” of LA’s most notorious crime figures to Las Vegas. Jenning builds on his extensive research conducted for Testimony of Death (2016), his debut book on the mysterious demise of movie star Thelma Todd, while avoiding the lure of hagiographic accounts that paint Raymond as a “true knight in the story of LA’s corrupt days,” as he describes it. Instead, the author offers a complex portrait of a brave cop beset with his own demons, which included a history of alcoholism and brutality. The book might have benefited from more detail on racial dynamics in the city given the history of racism in the LAPD. Nonetheless, this is a well-paced and well-researched account that Jenning complements with ample photos, maps, and newspaper clippings.
An exciting addition to the true-crime history of Depression-era LA.Pub Date: May 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73-678680-2
Page Count: 369
Publisher: Bay City Press
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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