Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star -dust in Hollywood were investigations of a farm at which boys were systematically kidnapped and murdered. In the case of Mrs Collins her son had disappeared. After five months the police reported him found, and returned an impostor to the poor woman. She denied his identity, so the police thrust her into the asylum, saying she was * a nut.' Discharged by the doctors as perfectly sane, she tried to resume her work in the telephone service, but was dismissed on the grounds that she had been in an asylum. The boy was proved to be an impostor, but the police refused to censure the officer in charge of the case. Marco, the king of the underworld and chief gangster for a bank that was financing the principal bootleggers, shot two strangers in a cabaret. He was condemned first to six months* imprisonment for bootlegging, then for two years for the shooting. " Till the elections are over," a cynical Los Angelesian assured me. " Then he will appeal and come out again. They can't condemn him. He's got too much graft." Every single issue of a Los Angeles paper rivalled in horrors, in weird murders, divorces, tragedies, lunacies, the best efforts of the most lurid London Sunday paper gleaning England for a week. Although, luckily, our landlord desisted from home practice we were not deprived of music. In former days these bungalows had let for as much as £i 6 a month, but, owing to the tremendous land slump and the heavy overbuilding of similar places, the rents had been reduced to ^10. In comparison with rival bungalow courts they gave more accommodation for equal rents and had a larger garden. So the bungalows in our group were seldom empty, although our landlady had the habit of bewailing the hard times and their own serious losses. Out of the fourteen bungalows at least nine were in continual use, and of the nine at least [32]