Los Angeles (pronounce it with a hard G, please) has long been touted as a paradise of sunshine, good health, and fresh starts, but anyone who's ever seen one of the dozens of classic film noirs that are set there or read a novel authored by Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, or a dozen other hardboiled writers knows there's another side to the City of Angels, that it is, as Chandler wrote, a town "dark with something more than night."