Now the TNT Original Series MOB CITY Midcentury Los Angeles. A city sold to the world as "the white spot of America," a land of sunshine and orange groves, wholesome Midwestern values and Hollywood stars, protected by the world’s most famous police force, the Dragnet-era LAPD. Behind this public image lies a hidden world of "pleasure girls" and crooked cops, ruthless newspaper tycoons, corrupt politicians, and East Coast gangsters on the make. Into this underworld came two men—one L.A.’ s most notorious gangster, the other its most famous police chief—each prepared to battle the other for the soul of the city.

Los Angeles Noir brings you tales of crime and passion and betrayal from some of the most innovative and celebrated writers working today. —A Los Angeles Times best seller, Book Sense Notable Pick, and SCIBA Book Award Winner Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Brand-new stories by: Michael Connelly, Janet Fitch, Susan Straight, Héctor Tobar, Patt Morrison, Emory Holmes II, Robert Ferrigno, Gary Phillips, Christopher Rice, Naomi Hirahara, Jim Pascoe, Neal Pollack, Scott Phillips, Diana Wagman, Lienna Silver, Brian Ascalon Roley, and Denise Hamilton.

Available Now: World-famous musician Ry Cooder publishes his first collection of stories.

This book combines film studies with urban theory in a spatial exploration of twentieth century Los Angeles. Configured through the dark lens of noir, the author examines an alternate urban history of Los Angeles forged by the fictional modes of detective fiction, film noir and neo noir. Dark portrayals of the city are analyzed in Raymond Chandler’s crime fiction through to key films like Double Indemnity (1944) and The End of Violence (1997). By employing these fictional elements as the basis for historicising the city’s unrivalled urban form, the analysis demonstrates an innovative approach to urban historiography. Revealing some of the earliest tendencies of postmodern expression in Hollywood cinema, this book will be of great relevance to students and researchers working in the fields of film, literature, cultural and urban studies. It will also be of interest to scholars researching histories of Los Angeles and the American noir imagination.

Film noir has always been associated with urban landscapes, and no two cities have been represented more prominently in these films than New York and Los Angeles. In noir and neo-noir films since the 1940s, both cities are ominous locales where ruthless ambition, destructive impulses, and dashed hopes are played out against backdrops indifferent to human dramas. In Urban Noir: New York and Los Angeles in Shadow and Light, James J. Ward and Cynthia J. Miller have brought together essays by an international group of scholars that examine the dark appeal of these two cities. The essays in this volume explore aspects of the noir and neo-noir cityscape that have been relatively unexamined, including the role of sound and movement through space, the distinctive character of certain neighborhoods and locales, and the importance of individual moments in time. Among the films discussed in this book are classic noirs Double Indemnity (1944), He Walked by Night (1948), and Criss Cross (1949), as well as neo-noirs such as Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), Klute (1971), Taxi Driver (1976), Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), Cruising (1980), Alphabet City (1984), Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Drive (2011), Rampart (2011), and Nightcrawler (2014). Uniting these essays is a thematic orientation toward darkness, whether interpreted in atmospheric and architectural terms, in social and psychological terms, or in terms of disruptive change, economic dislocation, and real or perceived existential threats. Offering multiple new perspectives on a wide range of films, Urban Noir will be of interest to scholars of film, media, politics, sociology, history, and popular culture.

New in town, huh? Look around, kidpalm trees, movie stars, glittering promises of fame and fortune....Now look closer, and you'll see the real action in the City of Angels: goons and thugs, backroom dice clubs, motel room cheesecake shots, crusading cops, and a few unlucky saps who didn't make it out alive. Sins of the City is a daring photographic compendium of vintage vice in Los Angeles from the '20s to the '50s, the true-life pictures of a milieu immortalized in the hard-bitten novels of Raymond Chandler, Walter Mosley, and James Ellroy, and such films as Criss Cross, Double Indemnity, Chinatown, and LA Confidential. Pore over 200 shots of the people, places, and events that only tabloids such as Hush-Hush, Confidential, and Whisper dared publish. Witness the LAPD bust a floating casino, see a dapper Bugsy Siegel "before" (living) and "after" (deeply deceased), and marvel at the criminal excess of marijuana-stuffed suitcases. Author Jim Heimann has scoured archives and newspaper morgues for prime examples of Southland's inglorious past, presenting a compelling history of its notorious corruption. Sure, it's a tough city, but thankfully someone was there to record it all.

In 'Bunker Hill Los Angeles: Essence of Sunshine and Noir', historian Nathan Marsak tells the story of the Hill, from the district's inception in the mid-nineteenth century to its present day. Marsak commemorates the poets and writers, artists and activists, little guys and big guys, and of course, the many architects who built and rebuilt the community on the Hill - time after historic time. Any fan of American architecture will treasure Marsak's analysis of buildings that have crowned the Hill: the exuberance of Victorian shingle and spindlework, from Mission to Modern, from Queen Anne to Frank Gehry, Bunker Hill has been home to it all, the ever-changing built environment.