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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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BROWN'S REQUIEM
This is the story of Fritz Brown's nightmare, played
out in the underworld of golf caddies, arson and incest, against a backdrop
of Los Angeles - surreal by night and bad by day. Brown, the ex-alcoholic
private eye, is driven back to the bottle and the gun.
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CLANDESTINE
Set in Los Angeles in the 1950s, this is the story of
Frederick Underhill's dream to become the most celebrated detective
of all time. The death of a lonely woman soon gives him his chance but
instead of finding his career on the way up, Underhill finds his life
about to collapse.
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DICK CONTINO'S BLUES AND OTHER STORIES
Dick Contino, a 50s accordion player, a star in the making,
is destroyed by a draft-dodging scandal. His life is on the skids until
he comes up with the idea of resurrecting his career with a fake kidnapping
scam. Meanwhile a serial killer is on the loose.
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KILLER ON THE ROAD (SILENT TERROR)
In one of Ellroy's most fascinating and grueling novels,
the twisted, mortally brilliant mind of serial murderer Martin Plunkett,
is laid open for the reader, with chilling, pulse-pounding realism.
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HOLLYWOOD NOCTURNES
Gritty, strange, and darkly humorous short stories, along
with a novella, portray mayhem, corruption, and sexual perversion in 1950s
Los Angeles.
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AMERICAN TABLOID
Set in America in 1958, this is a story of three men beneath
the glossy surface of power, allied to the makers and shakers of the era.
As the festering discontent of the age burns in these men's hearts, the
Bay of Pigs ends in calamity, the Mob clamors for payback, and Kennedy
is assassinated.
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MY DARK PLACES
An investigation into the murder of crime writer, James
Ellroy's mother. She was murdered in 1958 and the case was never solved,
leaving her son to embark on years of petty crime and drinking. Only later,
as a writer, did he begin to delve into his past and set out to solve
the mystery.
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CRIME WAVE
Los Angeles. In no other city do sex, celebrity, money,
and crime exert such an irresistible magnetic field. And no writer has
mapped that field with greater savagery and savvy than James Ellroy. With
this fever-hot collection of reportage and short fiction, he returns to
his native habitat and portrays it as a smog-shrouded netherworld where
"every third person is a peeper, prowler, pederast, or pimp." From the
scandal sheets of the 1950s to this morning's police blotter, Ellroy reopens
true crimes and restores human dimensions to their victims. Sublimely,
he resurrects the rag Hush-Hush magazine. And in a baroquely plotted
novella of slaughter and corruption he enlists the forgotten luminaries
of a lost Hollywood.
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THE
COLD SIX THOUSAND
Dallas, November
63 the heart of the American Dream detonated. Wayne Tedrow Jr.,
a young Vegas cop, arrives with a loathsome job to do. He's got
$6,000 in cash and no idea that he is about to plunge into the cover-up
conspiracy already brewing around the assassination, no idea that
this will mark the beginning of a hellish five-year ride through
the private underbelly of public policy. Ellroy's furiously paced
narrative tracks Tedrow's ride: Dallas to Vegas, with the Mob and
Howard Hughes, south with the Klan and J. Edgar Hoover, shipping
out to Vietnam and returning home, the bearer of white powder, plotting
new deaths as 1968 approaches.
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THE L.A. QUARTET
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THE BLACK DAHLIA
Based on a notorious Hollywood murder case, this study
of psycho-sexual obsession is the first part of Ellroy's "LA Quartet".
In 1947 a beautiful young woman walked into the night and met her horrific
destiny. Five days later, her tortured body was found drained of blood
and cut in half.
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THE BIG NOWHERE
1950s Los Angeles: the City of Angels has become the city
of the Angel of Death. Communist witch-hunts and violent killings are
terrorizing the community. Three men are plunged into a maelstrom of violence
and deceit when their lives become linked as each one confronts his own
personal darkness.
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L.A. CONFIDENTIAL
Christmas 1951, Los Angeles: a city where the police are
as corrupt as the criminals. Six prisoners are beaten senseless in their
cells by cops crazed on alcohol. For the LAPD detectives involved, the
events will expose the guilty secrets on which they have built their corrupt
and violent careers.
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WHITE JAZZ
Los Angeles in 1958 is a city on the make; a boom town
at the edge of a new era ripe for plunder. Lieutenant Dave Klein - in
turn lawyer, bagman, slum landlord and mob killer - stands at the center
of a complex web of violence and death. This is the final part of Ellroy's
"LA Quartet".
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LLOYD HOPKINS MYSTERIES
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BLOOD ON THE MOON
Detective Lloyd Hopkins tracks down a vicious serial killer
whose intensity and drive may be matched only by the fierce and unrepentant
Hopkins.
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BECAUSE THE NIGHT
Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins had a hunch there was
a connection between the three bloody bodies lying in a Hollywood liquor
store, and one missing undercover cop. Following that hunch would take
him down a trail of gore and violence. And it would plunge Hopkins into
the dark heart of madness . . . and beyond.
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SUICIDE HILL
The sleazy underworld of Los Angeles is brought to life
once more by a master of dark and violent noir mysteries, James Ellroy.
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L.A. NOIR
A single-volume edition of three of the novels featuring
Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins of Los Angeles. The first involves the
apparently random killings of 20 women, the second a multiple murder committed
with a home-Civil-War revolver, and the third a conspiracy of police corruption.
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Born
in Los Angeles in 1948, James Ellroy suffered considerably in the early
years of his life. His parents divorced when he was four and his mother
was murdered six years later. His father died a year after. This took
him to the streets and he became a petty thief as well as an alcoholic.
Ellroy was arrested between 1965 and 1977 thirty times (twelve convictions).
After being hospitalized for double pneumonia in 1977, he cleaned up and
began working as a golf caddy in California. While he continued to work
Ellroy wrote his first book, Brown’s Requiem. His second, Clandestine,
earned him a nomination for the Edgar Award. With his third, Blood on
the Moon – where he introduced police detective Lloyd Hopkins who would
feature in another two books – he was able to concentrate entirely on
his literature and drop the job as caddy becoming one of the most famous
hard-boiled mystery writers of the US. One of Ellroy’s latest books, My
Dark Places, is a true story on the investigation into his mother’s death.