Max Allan Collins

Richard Rayner

In Depression-era Chicago, the most fearsome hitman in town learns that the mob intends to kill his twelve-year-old son.

Road to Perdition

Traces the dual story of 1920s Los Angeles prosecutor's office crime-scene investigator Leslie White and ambitious corrupt political candidate Dave Clark, documenting how Clark was deemed a prime suspect in the brutal murder of mob boss Charlie Crawford.

Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age

A Bright and Guilty Place

Spanning two continents and three decades, The Cloud Sketcher is an epic tale of love, murder and revenge.

The Cloud Sketcher

'About as noir as it can be...excellent' Frances Fyfield, Daily Telegraph The city is Los Angeles, the birthplace of the American dream, a city that has come to symbolize both heaven and hell. Billy McGrath is an enigma, half American, half English, who once dreamed of pursuing a career as an academic philosopher, but for the last fifteen years he's been a homicide detective -- one of LA's best. He knows the rules, and understands a justice system that punishes the underprivileged and lets the rich go free. He's an unhappy man, divorced from the wife he still adores and separated from a daughter for whom he'd willingly die. If he hasn't yet thought of suicide, he soon will. McGrath is called to a crime scene -- a woman dead on a kitchen floor in one of the city's seamiest neighbourhoods, an apparently routine assignment until he discovers that the murdered woman's son is LA's biggest crack dealer, an idol of the ghetto who offers him a one-million-dollar bounty for the name of the killer. Making the wrong choice for what might be the right reasons, McGrath initiates both his own fall from grace and, as he strives to redeem himself, a series of wild and furious actions that hurtle h

Murder Book

Los Angeles was the fastest growing city in the world, mad with oil fever, get-rich-quick schemes, celebrity scandals, and religious fervor. It was also rife with organized crime, with a mayor and a DA in the pocket of the syndicates. Here, historian Richard Rayner narrates the entwined lives of two men, Dave Clark and Leslie White, who were caught up in the crimes, murders, and swindles of the day. Over a few transformative years, as the boom times shaded into the Depression, the adventures of Clark and White would inspire pulp fiction and replace L.A.'s reckless optimism with a new cynicism. Together, theirs is the tale of how the city of sunshine got noir. --From publisher description.

Documents how four middle-class merchants in the mid-nineteenth-century rose to wealth and power by investing in the transcontinental railroad and engaging in ruthless activities in order to retain their influence throughout California. Reprint. 13,000 first printing.

The Associates: Four Capitalists Who Created California (Enterprise)

Billy McGrath, a philosopher turned top L.A. homicide detective, has consistently resisted the temptations and injustices of a corrupt system. But McGrath's dedication to the job has cost him the woman he loves and the daughter he'd die for ... and he's finally reached his breaking point. So when the city's biggest crack dealer offers him $1 million in cash as trade for the identity of a man McGrath believes to be a stone-cold killer, he takes it. And thus begins the ruin of a good man, whose fall from grace will take him on a riveting ride through the darkness of a tarnished city, and into the deepest folds of his own soul.

Maurice Valentine is being groomed by important people for big things. He's a noted Los Angeles architect whose commissions take him from the developing Las Vegas strip to the top-secret atomic-test sites in the surrounding desert, jobs that have him mixing with gangsters, politicians, Rat-Pack hangers-on, and other powerful players. Poised to achieve even greater professional heights, Valentine appears unstoppable. Then Mallory Walker enters his life, presenting herself as an heiress with a keen eye for architecture. Valentine, normally a cool hand at the casual affair, falls head over heels and whisks the mysterious beauty off to Las Vegas for some time alone. At a swank penthouse party where the high rollers gather - Lana Turner's there, and Frank Sinatra - Valentine introduces Mallory to the powerful Paul Mantilini, the mobster who's made Valentine's career. It's then that Valentine gets the first inkling that something's amiss, that Mallory might have an agenda at odds with his own. At last the moment they've been waiting for has arrived, the evening's spectacle. A piercing flash of light is followed by a bubble of boiling red rising from the horizon: forty-five miles across the Nevada desert, the Atomic Energy Committee has detonated another of its 4,600 A-bombs. The crowd cowers, stumbles, readjusts, reaches for their drinks, hoping to hide the terror for a moment longer behind their martini glasses and champagne flutes. Valentine's life will never be the same - not because of that explosion, but for what comes immediately after. From the corner of his eye, he sees Mallory walking toward him, but doesn't see the nickel-plated pistol until it's too late. Confused, he calls out to her. She raises the gun, points it, and fires. How could Valentine have found himself so far removed from the carefully constructed, tidy life he'd been building all these years? The discovery of Mallory's true motive, and of her relationship with Mantilini and the elite of both Las Vegas and Palm Springs, will send Valentine down a path of twisted schemes, murder, and lies within lies - and will force him to make a fateful decision that will save one life and end another.

The Devil's Wind

Barbara, a Playboy bunny, is delectable. Richard loves her. He abandons his life in London, a steady girlfriend, and a job, and flies to Los Angeles in search of Barbara and the romanticized America he's seen only in the movies. Richard obsessively pursues Barbara through a series of misadventures that take him from photography sessions in the desert to encounters with men in gorilla suits and "surf Nazis." Eventually he succeeds in wooing her, and they marry, bathed in the neon lights of Las Vegas. But their happiness unravels, and Barbara skips out. Richard determines to win her back; then he, too, takes flight, as the happy ending he had envisioned for their lives fades to black in the film capital of the world. Brilliantly candid and comedic, Richard Rayner's ironic first book is a cult favorite—later filmed starring David Tennant, Julie Delpy and Johnny Depp—and a dazzling travelogue of love, loss, and all destinations in between.

Los Angeles Without a Map

Richard Rayner had a peripatetic childhood, and it seemed he found some sense of place when he attended Cambridge University. The study of philosophy combined with an obsession with books, however, served as the catalyst for a bizarre life of crime. Mounting debts propelled the author into a series of adventures, as he plundered bookstores for elusive first editions, forged checks, and acted as an accomplice in a Keystone Kops-like attempted bank robbery. In a memoir that's "compelling, edgy, painfully alive" (Times Literary Supplement), like "stripped-down Dostoevsky" (Time), this is the personal story, both tragic and comic, of an absence of identity and a long checkered past of crimes and misdemeanors.

Richard Rayner

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