A historian of Los Angeles in the era before World War II explores one of the city’s most famous real-life detectives.

Jenning offers readers a riveting portrait of early-20th-century LA in this biography of detective Harry Raymond, who was described by his contemporaries as “the most feared copper in California.” Raymond’s life provides the author the opportunity to explore the city “through the peephole,” as he puts it; he introduces readers to the web of “vice districts” in LA that served as “a moneymaking industry for just about everybody,” including “cops, councilmen, and mayors.” Raymond arrived there at the age of 21 and would rise through the ranks of the LA Police Department as a key member of the “goon squad” that targeted gangsters and gamblers. Although he’d later serve a stint as the chief of the San Diego Police Department, Raymond never fully cut ties with the City of Angels, continuing to run his own private detective practice in the city. Upon his return to the LAPD in 1933, he resumed his duties with the gangster squad, which eventually led him to investigate systemic corruption in local government and the LAPD itself. By 1938, he’d become a national sensation, helping to bring down a corrupt mayor and nearly two dozen dirty cops, and he ushered in the “migration” of LA’s most notorious crime figures to Las Vegas. Jenning builds on his extensive research conducted for Testimony of Death (2016), his debut book on the mysterious demise of movie star Thelma Todd, while avoiding the lure of hagiographic accounts that paint Raymond as a “true knight in the story of LA’s corrupt days,” as he describes it. Instead, the author offers a complex portrait of a brave cop beset with his own demons, which included a history of alcoholism and brutality. The book might have benefited from more detail on racial dynamics in the city given the history of racism in the LAPD. Nonetheless, this is a well-paced and well-researched account that Jenning complements with ample photos, maps, and newspaper clippings.

An exciting addition to the true-crime history of Depression-era LA.