Los Angeles, California

Twenty-first-century Los Angeles is California's most populous city (with 3.8 million in 2010) in a gigantic sprawling metropolitan area with 12 million residents in over 80 contiguous municipalities. Los Angeles city, county, and metropolitan areas have provided the locations, backdrops, and story lines for classic and [Page 1038]contemporary works of crime fiction, including Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939) and James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia (published in 1987 but based on the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short in January 1947), police procedural ...