SINS OF THE CITYPublished by Chronicle Books Llc, 1999.
The author of "May I Take Your Order" offers 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. 200 photos.
In the first half of the 20th century, Los Angeles was as well known for its lurid nightlife and criminal underground as it was for the Hollywood film empire. Often, of course, the two sides of L.A. met, as when Robert Mitchum was busted for marijuana possession in 1949; among the photos collected in Sins of the City you'll find a snapshot of Mitchum in prison gear during his 50-day incarceration. You'll also find several pictures of local crime boss Mickey Cohen and his gang, usually after somebody's made an attempt to rub them out. Several of the crime scene photos are not for the squeamish, including the shooting death of mobster Bugsy Siegel and the discovery of both halves of the body of Elizabeth Short, better remembered as the Black Dahlia. (Actually, the two pictures of Short's bisected corpse are taken from a distance, compared to more gruesome photos of that scene found in other sources.
Jim Heimann's introduction provides some historical context, but it's the photos themselves that are the real attraction here. From them you'll get a sense of what the gambling parlors, speakeasies, and drag balls of the period looked like--as well as Beverly Hills movie premieres, the back alleys of Chinatown, and the exteriors of such swank nightclubs as La Conga and the Mocambo. Sins of the City is fascinating reference material for readers of classic L.A. noir (it includes quotes from several authors, among them Raymond Chandler and John Fante), as well as anyone interested in studying or writing about this period.
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