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Colin Marshall sits down at the University of Southern California with Richard Rayner, author of the novels\\xa0Los Angeles Without a Map,\\xa0The Elephant,\\xa0Murder Room,\\xa0The Cloud Sketcher, and\\xa0The Devil\'s Wind\\xa0as well as the non-fiction books\\xa0The Blue Suits,\\xa0Drake\'s Fortune,\\xa0The Associates, and\\xa0A Bright and Guilty Place. They discuss the three or four Los Angeleses in which he\'s lived since arriving in the city from England in the early eighties; the "up-for-it-ness" of the Los Angeles he first discovered; the reporting he later did from the 1992 riots, and the "geographical apartheid" he saw; his lack of a driver\'s license, and how he addresses the question of where the buses go; his observations of how the city once flung itself outward from downtown, and now flings itself back inward; Los Angeles\' simultaneously unsurpassed optimism\\xa0and\\xa0pessimism; USC\'s Doheny Library as a metaphor for blunt capitalism in action; why we crave stories about Los Angeles\' foundation on wrongdoing; how Los Angeles gets liked more in deed than word; how the current wave of interest in local history began; Los Angeles\' era of booster books against anti-booster books; his escape from English history only to plunge into Los Angeles history; what his unfinished novel of a man who loses his memory in Wales revealed to him about his own life in America; how his English hometown diversified, and how Los Angeles did the same; his cycle through "dustbins of jaded cynicism," and the different sensibility his students (one of whom has written "the gay Korean Los Angeles novel") bring to bear; his favorite bus lines to take notes on overheard conversations; and how his enjoyment of the riots, in a sense, got him writing about his own criminal past.