I've recently finished James Ellroys 'L.A. Quartet' - The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz.
These four books, blending historical fact and pastiche and fiction to such a degree that it becomes impossible to tell where truth ends, more than anything tell the tale of L.A.'s post-War boom and decline.
Beginning with The Black Dahlia we follow one police officer through a web police corruption, exploitation of sensational cases for fame, the sexual deviancies of the rich & powerful, the broken dreams of one girl from Hyde Park MA.
Next in The Big Nowhere we begin to get a sense of the larger picture: this time the subject is the Red Scare and its cynical exploitation by Studio bosses to get Organised Labour out, by the Mob to get Teamsters in, and by politicans to advance their career. The backdrop to these machinations is formed by the horrific crime of a Hollywood actor and his son. And questions about how these two intersect with a Sleepy Lagoon? This also introduces Ellroys common 3-man perspective, his reoccurring motif of desperate corrupted men trying (and failing) to make amends to the world. And finally, provides our first look at the demonic Lt. Dudley Smith.
L.A. Confidential picks up where the previous ended, literally: its first chapter informs us of the last stand of the only survivor of its trio of leads who concluded The Big Nowhere fleeing to Mexico. His finale propels the story from then on. I wont dally on it the film translates the core essence of the book albeit cutting about 8 plots down to 3, the exception being that Dudley Smiths plan for 'containment' via narcotics of "Darktown" (common parlance for the predominately African-American neighbourhoods) is never elaborated on in the film - there he is simply presented as simply taking over the rackets.
The fourth and final work White Jazz returns to the first person perspective: of a corrupt police officer who moonlights as a mob enforcer trying to chart his own course through organised crime, law enforcement, an FBI probe into the LAPD, an investigation of a bizarre peeping tom case involving a drug cartel-family with a long history of police protection, and stumbling onto the secret war between Chief of Detectives Edmund Exley and Captain Dudley Smith (another difference in L.A. Confidential is that the bastard wasn't killed at the end of the novel).
Ellroys subsequent work, following the autobiographical tale of delving into his mothers unsolved murder, returns to a similar theme but with the entirety of America itself being the subject.

Now I am reading Fritz Leibers The First Book of Lankhmar from Orions Fantasy Masterworks, an omnibus that combines the first four Swords... collection of short stories & novellas.

hahah @ the wrong end of the telescope!

Apparently this was going to be the final Famous Five book, ending in 1947, but popularity kept the series going: