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Born in England, Richard Rayner now lives in Los Angeles. Rayner is the author of nine books. His first, Los Angeles Without A Map, was published in 1988. Part-fiction, part-travelogue, this was turned into a movie L.A. Without a Map. In 1996, Rayner published The Blue Suit, a memoir about his early life that won an Esquire Non-Fiction Award in the UK.
His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and many other publications. He has worked as an editor at Time Out Magazine, in London, and later on the literary magazine Granta, then based in Cambridge.
Currently Rayner writes a monthly column entitled Paperback Writers for the Los Angeles Times. His work has been translated into many languages. He lives in Santa Monica.
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This novel is a departure from your previous novel, Murder Book,
although some elements of detective fiction are still present. Does it signal a
permanent change of direction in your work?
Murder Book was Los Angeles cops and robbers, in other words a
straightforward genre novel, although it arose out of real and true experiences
I'd had with the LAPD while reporting for the New York Times magazine, so
it didn't quite feel like that as I was writing it. It felt like fictional
reportage on the city in which I live. Only later did I realize, hey, I've
written a police procedural. But I've always loved what good genre writers give
you: story, pace, movement, life, a sense of things happening on the page.
Likewise, I find a lot of so-called literary novels dull fare indeed. The
Cloud Sketcher is very different in that it's historical and has a big
sweep-encompassing the Finnish Civil War, architecture and idealism, New York in
the 1920s, the Jazz Age etc. The element of detective fiction is murder, a
turning point in the story, although I don't think that violence belongs to, or
should be left to, the crime genre alone. I suppose what I tried to do with The
Cloud Sketcher, and will be hoping ...
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James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the acclaimed L.A. Quartet - The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz, as well as the Underworld USA trilogy: American Tabloid, The ... (more)
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