The Library of America blog has an essay and an excerpt from Joan Didion’s “L.A. Noir.” “Around Division 47, Los Angeles Municipal Court, the downtown courtroom where, for eleven weeks during the spring and summer of 1989, a preliminary hearing was held to determine if the charges brought in the 1983 murder of a thirty-three-year-old road-show promoter named Roy Alexander Radin should be dismissed or if the defendants should be bound over to superior court for arraignment and trial, it was said that there were, ‘in the works,’ five movies, four books, and ‘countless’ pieces about the case.”