James Hugh Richardson

James Hugh Richardson (1894-1963) was born in Windsor, Ontario, started in newspapers at the Winnipeg Telegram in 1912, and moved to a reporting job at the Los Angeles Evening Herald in 1913. He became the Herald's city editor and later held the same post at the Los Angeles Examiner from 1937 to 1957, running coverage of the crime and scandal stories of the city's tabloid decades. Spring Street was written on assignment for his own paper, and in its foreword he refused the title of novelist, saying he wished to be known only as a reporter. He told his own story in the 1954 memoir For the Life of Me: Memoirs of a City Editor.