The three book amigos

Get this -- legendary newspaper editor Jim Bellows, L.A. Times columnist Al Martinez and former Her-Exer Rip Rense have all written books in the last three years with titles that begin The Last [something]. Now the odd part. They are doing "Airtalk" with Larry Mantle on KPCC together on Tuesday, July 29, and that night will sign books together at Dutton's Brentwood. All this according to Rense's website. He's the one with the new book to push, The Last Byline, a novel about a calamitous year in the life of a scribe at a paper its habitues call the "Chronic Illness."

The Los Angeles Chronicle building was a fossil. In 1915, it loomed over the stubby brick office buildings and whispering beanfields of downtown like an emperor’s summer palace. Now, in the year of our Lord, 1980, it was little more than a bit of history, freakish amid glassy high-rises and maniac buses.

Architecturally, it looked liked something based on California missions, and the Casbah. An Egyptian variation of an Elks’ Lodge. A Mesopotamian bingo parlor. It had been designed by a twenty-year-old Russian genius who was murdered at 21 in a homosexual love triangle.