Spring Street

John Gallant’s father dies and leaves a $200 funeral bill, so John takes a prizefight at Jack Doyle’s Vernon arena to pay it. He loses, the crowd passes a hat for him, and a sporting editor at ringside offers him work on a Los Angeles paper. The newsroom apprenticeship that follows turns serious when a reform police commissioner, Reginald Gibson, starts campaigning against police graft, and John and a veteran reporter named Brennan begin to suspect the crusade is a front for the underworld boss who controls him. Consuello Carrillo, daughter of an old Spanish Californian family, is engaged to Gibson, which makes John’s position worse. Richardson wrote the book in seven weeks on assignment for the Evening Herald, and the newsroom he describes is one he actually worked in.