My name is Banner, Kent Banner," this set of three stories begins. "I’m a private detective. My DeSoto is paid for, and looks it. I have a couple of grand in the bank, a.38 on my hip, and every cheap hood, crooked cop, and shyster lawyer in L.A. on my back most of the time," he continues. All of the elements of great detective stories are here: perpetually gray weather, a just-divorced detective who attracts women and bad guys in equal measure, mysterious notes, stray guns and informants named Pencil and Big Sally. Join Kenneth Banner in post-war Los Angeles, where everyone from rich socialites to the wife of a nuclear scientist need his help. You can't help but love Banner; he's straight out of the best detective stories you've read: insightful, humble, quick-witted with a dry sense of humor, a man who loves his scotch as much as he loves seeing justice done. Think Guy Noir in L.A., with the type of characters you would find in the City of Angels, not in the more pedestrian Midwest. See if you can figure out whodunit faster than Banner in this entertaining set of three stories.
My name is Banner, Kent Banner," this set of three stories begins. "I’m a private detective. My DeSoto is paid for, and looks it. I have a couple of grand in the bank, a.38 on my hip, and every cheap hood, crooked cop, and shyster lawyer in L.A. on my back most of the time," he continues. All of the elements of great detective stories are here: perpetually gray weather, a just-divorced detective who attracts women and bad guys in equal measure, mysterious notes, stray guns and informants named Pencil and Big Sally. Join Kenneth Banner in post-war Los Angeles, where everyone from rich socialites to the wife of a nuclear scientist need his help. You can't help but love Banner; he's straight out of the best detective stories you've read: insightful, humble, quick-witted with a dry sense of humor, a man who loves his scotch as much as he loves seeing justice done. Think Guy Noir in L.A., with the type of characters you would find in the City of Angels, not in the more pedestrian Midwest. See if you can figure out whodunit faster than Banner in this entertaining set of three stories.
This book uses real-world examples, case studies, and commentary from practitioners to reveal the many and varied strategies American and English lawyers use to protect truth. It shows how they tackle their conflicting duties, and highlights the 'tragic choices' lawyers everywhere routinely make through their 'power of decision'. What emerges are new ways of understanding the critical role lawyers play in society – and their professional responsibilities. 'Truth is so precious it should always be protected by a bodyguard of lies.' Churchill said this about wartime deception plans, but lawyers' clients may think their truth - especially an 'inconvenient truth' - is so precious it too should be protected. Lawyers are 'bodyguards of lies' when they use so-called 'tricks of the trade' not only to keep clients' secrets but to construct a reality that is far from real. But should they? Lawyers have a divided loyalty. The book presents a unique and fascinating account of what happens when lawyers' duties to clients conflict with their duties to the legal system, and looks in detail at the ethical codes and laws that regulate their conduct.
From the bestselling biographer of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman comes a multi-generational saga of one of America's wealthiest and most controversial families--the Annenbergs.
With a deep history that threads back to the days of Alistair Crowley and an ancient house, the spirits of some long dead magicians live on by possessing the lives of others in the present day.
“WANTED. YOUNG, SKINNY, WIRY FELLOWS. NOT OVER 18. MUST BE EXPERT RIDERS. WILLING TO RISK DEATH DAILY. ORPHANS PREFERRED.” —California newspaper help-wanted ad, 1860 The Pony Express is one of the most celebrated and enduring chapters in the history of the United States, a story of the all-American traits of bravery, bravado, and entrepreneurial risk that are part of the very fabric of the Old West. No image of the American West in the mid-1800s is more familiar, more beloved, and more powerful than that of the lone rider galloping the mail across hostile Indian territory. No image is more revered. And none is less understood. Orphans Preferred is both a revisionist history of this magnificent and ill-fated adventure and an entertaining look at the often larger-than-life individuals who created and perpetuated the myth of “the Pony,” as it is known along the Pony Express trail that runs from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California. The Pony Express is a story that exists in the annals of Americana where fact and fable collide, a story as heroic as the journey of Lewis and Clark, as complex and revealing as the legacy of Custer’s Last Stand, and as muddled and freighted with yarns as Paul Revere’s midnight ride. Orphans Preferred is a fresh and exuberant reexamination of this great American story.
The love story between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy--in their own words Christopher Isherwood was the celebrated middle-aged English author of Goodbye to Berlin when he met the Californian teenager Don Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach in 1952. Defying convention, the two created an enduring relationship out of that initial spark--living as an openly gay couple for more than three decades in the closeted world of Hollywood. The Animals is the testimony in letters of their extraordinary partnership, which lasted until Isherwood's death in 1986--despite a thirty-year age gap, affairs, jealousies, the pressures of literary fame, and the disdain of twentieth-century America for love between two men. In romantic letters to each other, they invented the private world of the Animals. Chris was Dobbin, a stubborn old workhorse; Don was a rash, spirited white kitten named Kitty. The ability to create a world, a safe and separate milieu, was a great talent of Isherwood's--and a necessary one as a gay man in mid-twentieth-century America. But Isherwood knew how to spread hay around his stable and attract beauty. He drew Bachardy into his semisecret realm and together they invented a place for their love to thrive. Bold, transgressive, and playful, The Animals shows us the devotion between two creative spirits in tenderness and storms"--
The 1950s was one of the most turbulent periods in the history of motion pictures and television. During the decade, as Hollywood's most powerful studios and independent producers shifted into TV production, TV replaced film as America's principal postwar culture industry. This pioneering study offers the first thorough exploration of the movie industry's shaping role in the development of television and its narrative forms. Drawing on the archives of Warner Bros. and David O. Selznick Productions and on interviews with participants in both industries, Christopher Anderson demonstrates how the episodic telefilm series, a clear descendant of the feature film, became and has remained the dominant narrative form in prime-time TV. This research suggests that the postwar motion picture industry was less an empire on the verge of ruin—as common wisdom has it—than one struggling under unsettling conditions to redefine its frontiers. Beyond the obvious contribution to film and television studies, these findings add an important chapter to the study of American popular culture of the postwar period.
A man alone in a bedsit with a young woman friend, who suddenly unleashes a deadly onslaught, without warning or reason. The stabs don't hurt. They seem more like punches. Then he realises that the red liquid pumping out of his body and on to the floor is his blood. He doesn't realise, as he drifts into unconsciousness before death supervenes, that he'll never wake up again... In March 2013, Joanne Dennehy stabbed three Peterborough men to death within the space of a few days. One was her landlord, Kevin Lee. Dennehy and her sidekick, Gary Stretch, put the body into a wheelie bin and dumped his corpse in a ditch close to White Post Road in the Parish of Newborough. Lukasz Slaboszewski and John Chapman were stabbed to death and disposed of in a farmland ditch several miles away. She then attempted to murder two other men. By the grace of God they survived. Jo Dennehy is unique, for she now ranks alongside Myra Hindley and Rosemary West as one of the most heinous female serial killers in British criminal history. Only her death will bring about her release from prison. This book, by a leading criminologist and expert on serial killers, has been written with the full cooperation of the police involved in the case, and many of those who knew Joanne Dennehy and her victims.
During the Civil War, the Second Colorado Volunteer Regiment played a vital and often decisive role in the fight for the Union on the Great Plains—and in the westward expansion of the American empire. Christopher M. Rein’s The Second Colorado Cavalry is the first in-depth history of this regiment operating at the nexus of the Civil War and the settlement of the American West. Composed largely of footloose ’59ers who raced west to participate in the gold rush in Colorado, the troopers of the Second Colorado repelled Confederate invasions in New Mexico and Indian Territory before wading into the Burned District along the Kansas border, the bloodiest region of the guerilla war in Missouri. In 1865, the regiment moved back out onto the plains, applying what it had learned to peacekeeping operations along the Santa Fe Trail, thus definitively linking the Civil War and the military conquest of the American West in a single act of continental expansion. Emphasizing the cavalry units, whose mobility proved critical in suppressing both Confederate bushwhackers and Indian raiders, Rein tells the neglected tale of the “fire brigade” of the Trans-Mississippi Theater—a group of men, and a few women, who enabled the most significant environmental shift in the Great Plains’ history: the displacement of Native Americans by Euro-American settlers, the swapping of bison herds for fenced cattle ranges, and the substitution of iron horses for those of flesh and bone. The Second Colorado Cavalry offers us a much-needed history of the “guerilla hunters” who helped suppress violence and keep the peace in contested border regions; it adds nuance and complexity to our understanding of the unlikely “agents of empire” who successfully transformed the Central Plains.
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