Books by James Ellroy
The Best American Crime Writing 2005
by James Ellroy, Otto Penzler, Thomas H. Cook
The 2005 edition of The Best American Crime Writing offers the year's most shocking, compelling, and gripping writing about real-life crime, including Peter Landesman's article about female sex slaves (the most requested and widely read New York Times story of 2004), a piece from The New Yorker by Stephen J. Dubner (the coauthor of Freakanomics) about a high-society silver thief, and an extraordinarily memorable "ode to bar fights" written by Jonathan Miles for Men's Journal after he punched an editor at a staff party. But this year's edition includes a bonus - an original essay by James Ellroy detailing his fascination with Joseph Wambaugh and how it fed his obsession with crime - even to the point of selling his own blood to buy Wambaugh's books. Smart, entertaining, and controversial, The Best American Crime Writing is an essential edition to any crime enthusiast's bookshelf.
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The Black Dahlia
by James Ellroy
On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia-and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history. Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and rivals in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia-driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl's twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches-into a region of total madness.
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The Black Dahlia
by James Ellroy
The highly acclaimed novel based on America's most infamous unsolved murder case. Dive into 1940s Los Angeles as two cops spiral out of control in their hunt for The Black Dahlia's killer in this powerful thriller that is "brutal and at the same time believable" (New York Times).
On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a Los Angeles vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia -- and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history. Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and rivals in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia -- driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl's twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches -- into a region of total madness.
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No copies available.
The Black Dahlia
by James Ellroy
The highly acclaimed novel based on America's most infamous unsolved murder case. Dive into 1940s Los Angeles as two cops spiral out of control in their hunt for The Black Dahlia's killer in this powerful thriller that is "brutal and at the same time believable" (New York Times).
On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a Los Angeles vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia -- and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history. Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and rivals in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia -- driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl's twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches -- into a region of total madness.
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Destination: Morgue!: L.A. Tales
by James Ellroy
Dig. The Demon Dog gets down with a new book of scenes from America’s capital of kink: Los Angeles. Fourteen pieces, some fiction, some nonfiction, all true enough to be admissible as state’s evidence, and half of it in print for the first time. And every one of them bearing the James Ellroy brand of mayhem, machismo, and hollow-nose prose.
Here are Mexican featherweights and unsolved-murder vics, crooked cops and a very clean D.A. Here is a profile of Hollywood’s latest celebrity perp-walker, Robert Blake, and three new novellas featuring a demented detective with an obsession with a Hollywood actress. And, oh yes, just maybe the last appearance of Hush-Hush sleaze-monger Danny Getchell. Here’s Ellroy himself, shining a 500-watt Mag light into all the dark places of his life and imagination. Destination: Morgue! puts the reader’s attention in a hammerlock and refuses to let go.
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Blood on the Moon
by James Ellroy
Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins can’t stand music, or any loud sounds. He’s got a beautiful wife, but he can’t get enough of other women. And instead of bedtime stories, he regales his daughters with bloody crime stories. He’s a thinking man’s cop with a dark past and an obsessive drive to hunt down monsters who prey on the innocent. Now, there’s something haunting him. He sees a connection in a series of increasingly gruesome murders of women committed over a period of twenty years. To solve the case, Hopkins will dump all the rules and risk his career to make the final link and get the killer.
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Because the Night
by James Ellroy
A botched liquor store heist leaves three grisly dead. A hero cop is missing. Nobody could see a pattern in these two stray bits of information–no one except Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins, a brilliant and disturbed L.A. cop with an obsessive desire to protect the innocent. To him they lead to one horrifying conclusion--a killer is on the loose and preying on his city. From the master of L.A. noir comes this beautiful and brutal tale of a cop and a criminal squared off in a life and death struggle.
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Hollywood Nocturnes
by James Ellroy
Dig it. A famous musician-cum-draft dodger is plotting the perfect celebrity snatch–his own. An ex-con raging on revenge in High Darktown becomes a cop's worst nightmare. While chasing kidnappers, two cops stumble on an okie town as bloody as the O.K. Corral. A strongarm for Howard Hughes and mobster Mickey Cohen finds himself playing both ends against the middle, all for a murderously magnificent moll. This is L.A., Ellroy style–corrupt cops, goons with guns, rattling roadsters–and all in the staccato rhythm of the streets. Hollywood Nocturnes shows us the seedy side of glamorous Hollywood, laid out like a corpse in the morgue.
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The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women: A Memoir
by James Ellroy
The legendary crime writer gives us a raw, brutally candid memoir—as high intensity and as riveting as any of his novels—about his obsessive search for “atonement in women.”
The year was 1958. Jean Hilliker had divorced her fast-buck hustler husband and resurrected her maiden name. Her son, James, was ten years old. He hated and lusted after his mother and “summoned her dead.” She was murdered three months later.
The Hilliker Curse is a predator’s confession, a treatise on guilt and on the power of malediction, and above all, a cri de cœur.JamesEllroy unsparingly describes his shattered childhood, his delinquent teens, his writing life, his love affairs and marriages, his nervous breakdown, and the beginning of a relationship with an extraordinary woman who may just be the long-sought Her.
A layered narrative of time and place, emotion and insight, sexuality and spiritual quest, The Hilliker Curse is a brilliant, soul-baring revelation of self. It is unlike any memoir you have ever read.
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This Storm: A novel
by James Ellroy
A massive novel of World War II Los Angeles. The crowning work of an American master.
It is January, 1942. Torrential rainstorms hit L.A. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops rate it a routine dead-man job. They're grievously wrong. It's a summons to misalliance and all the spoils of a brand-new war.
Elmer Jackson is a corrupt Vice cop. He's a flesh peddler and a bagman for the L.A. Chief of Police. Hideo Ashida is a crime-lab whiz, caught up in the maelstrom of the Japanese internment. Dudley Smith is an LAPD hardnose working Army Intelligence. He's gone rogue and gone all-the-way Fascist. Joan Conville was born rogue. She's a defrocked Navy lieutenant and a war profiteer to her core.
They've signed on for the dead-man job. They've got a hot date with History. They will fight their inner wars within The War with unstoppable fury.
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This Storm: A novel
by James Ellroy
January '42. L.A. reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese residents are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city.
A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops tag it a routine dead-man job. They're wrong. It's an early-warning signal of Chaos.
There's a murderous fire and a gold heist. There's Fifth Column treason on American soil. There are homegrown Nazis, Commies, and race racketeers. It's populism ascendant. There's two dead cops in a dive off the jazz-club strip. And three men and one woman have a hot date with history.
Elmer Jackson is a corrupt Vice cop. He's a flesh peddler and a bagman for the L.A. Chief of Police. Hideo Ashida is a crime-lab whiz, lashed by anti-Japanese rage. Dudley Smith is PD hardnose working Army Intelligence. He's gone rogue and gone all-the-way fascist. Joan Conville was born rogue. She's a defrocked Navy lieutenant and a war profiteer to her core.
L.A. '42. Homefront madness. Wartime inferno--This Storm is James Ellroy's most audacious novel yet. It is by turns savage, tender, elegiac. It lays bare and celebrates crazed Americans of all stripes. It is a masterpiece.
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Perfidia
by James Ellroy
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Los Angeles. December, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. War fever and racial hatred grip the city.
The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. LAPD captain William H. Parker is superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up, and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith—Irish émigré, ex-IRA killer, fledgling war profiteer. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. Kay Lake is a twenty-one-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. The investigation throws them together and rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm center that brilliantly illuminates these four driven souls—comrades, rivals, lovers, history’s pawns.
Here, Ellroy gives us the party at the edge of the abyss and the precipice of America’s ascendance. Perfidia is that moment, spellbindingly captured.
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Blood's a Rover
by James Ellroy
The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia.
A rip-roaring, devilishly wild ride through the bloody end of the 1960's. It's dark baby, and hot hot hot.
Martin Luther King assassinated. Robert Kennedy assassinated. Los Angeles, 1968. Conspiracies theories are taking hold. On the horizon looms the Democratic Convention in Chicago and constant gun fire peppers south L.A. Violence, greed, and grime, are replacing free-love and everybody from Howard Hughes, Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover to the right-wing assassins and left-wing revolutionaries are getting dirty. At the center of it all is a triumvirate: the president’s strong-arm goon, an ex-cop and heroine runner, and a private eye whose quarry is so dangerous she could set off the whole powder keg. With his trademark deadly staccato prose, James Ellroy holds nothing back in this wild, startling and much anticipated conclusion to his Underworld USA trilogy.
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American Tabloid
by James Ellroy
The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia.
We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination--in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C. . . .
Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy . . .
Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty . . .
Where three renegade law-enforcement officers--a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents--are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history. . . .
James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open.
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L.A. Confidential
by James Ellroy
L.A. Confidential is epic "noir", a crime novel of astonishing detail and scope written by the bestselling author of The Black Dahlia. A horrific mass murder invades the lives of victims and victimizers on both sides of the law. And three lawmen are caught in a deadly spiral, a nightmare that tests loyalty and courage, and offers no mercy, grants no survivors.
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The Best American Noir Of The Century
“Well worth its impressive weight in gold, it would be a crime not to have this seminal masterpiece in your collection.”—New York Journal of Books
In his introduction to The Best American Noir of the Century, James Ellroy writes, “Noir is the most scrutinized offshoot of the hard-boiled school of fiction. It’s the long drop off the short pier and the wrong man and the wrong woman in perfect misalliance. It’s the nightmare of flawed souls with big dreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing that goes bad.” Offering the best examples of literary sure things gone bad, this collection ensures that nowhere else can readers find a darker, more thorough distillation of American noir fiction.
James Ellroy and Otto Penzler mined writings of the past century to find this treasure trove of thirty-nine stories. From noir’s twenties-era infancy come gems like James M. Cain’s “Pastorale,” and its postwar heyday boasts giants like Mickey Spillane and Evan Hunter. Packing an undeniable punch, diverse contemporary incarnations include Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, Dennis Lehane, and William Gay, with many page-turners appearing from the past decade.
“Delightfully devilish . . . A strange trek through the years that includes stories from household names in the hard-boiled genre to lesser-known authors who nonetheless can hold their own with the legends.”—Associated Press
James Ellroy is the author of the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy—American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s a Rover—and the L.A. Quartet novels, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He is also the author of The Hillicker Curse, a memoir.
Otto Penzler is the founder of the Mysterious Bookshop and Mysterious Press, has won two Edgar Allan Poe Awards, and is series editor of The Best American Mystery Stories.
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Widespread Panic: A novel
by James Ellroy
From the modern master of noir comes a novel based on the real-life Hollywood fixer Freddy Otash, the malevolent monarch of the 1950s L.A. underground, and his Tinseltown tabloid Confidential magazine.
Freddy Otash was the man in the know and the man to know in ‘50s L.A. He was a rogue cop, a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp—and, most notably, the head strong-arm goon for Confidential magazine.
Confidential presaged the idiot internet—and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink, and the scurrilous skank. It mauled misanthropic movie stars, sex-soiled socialites, and putzo politicians. Mattress Jack Kennedy, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson—Frantic Freddy outed them all. He was the Tattle Tyrant who held Hollywood hostage, and now he’s here to CONFESS.
“I’m consumed with candor and wracked with recollection. I’m revitalized and resurgent. My meshugenah march down memory lane begins NOW.”
In Freddy’s viciously entertaining voice, Widespread Panic torches 1950s Hollywood to the ground. It’s a blazing revelation of coruscating corruption, pervasive paranoia, and of sin and redemption with nothing in between.
Here is James Ellroy in savage quintessence. Freddy Otash confesses—and you are here to read and succumb.
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Widespread Panic: A novel
by James Ellroy
From the modern master of noir comes a novel based on the real-life Hollywood fixer Freddy Otash, the malevolent monarch of the 1950s L.A. underground, and his Tinseltown tabloid Confidential magazine.
Freddy Otash was the man in the know and the man to know in ‘50s L.A. He was a rogue cop, a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp—and, most notably, the head strong-arm goon for Confidential magazine.
Confidential presaged the idiot internet—and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink, and the scurrilous skank. It mauled misanthropic movie stars, sex-soiled socialites, and putzo politicians. Mattress Jack Kennedy, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson—Frantic Freddy outed them all. He was the Tattle Tyrant who held Hollywood hostage, and now he’s here to CONFESS.
“I’m consumed with candor and wracked with recollection. I’m revitalized and resurgent. My meshugenah march down memory lane begins NOW.”
In Freddy’s viciously entertaining voice, Widespread Panic torches 1950s Hollywood to the ground. It’s a blazing revelation of coruscating corruption, pervasive paranoia, and of sin and redemption with nothing in between.
Here is James Ellroy in savage quintessence. Freddy Otash confesses—and you are here to read and succumb.
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Enchanters : A Novel
by James Ellroy
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • James Ellroy—Demon Dog of American Letters—goes straight to the tragic heart of 1962 Hollywood with a wild riff on the Marilyn Monroe death myth in an astonishing, behind-the-headlines crime epic.
Los Angeles, August 4, 1962. The city broils through a midsummer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash.
The freewheeling Freddy O: tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is love.” Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe’s death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle. We are with him as he tears through all those who block his path to the truth. We are with him as he penetrates the faux-sunshine of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the shuck of Camelot. We are with him as he falters, and grasps for love beyond opportunity. We are with him as he tracks Marilyn Monroe’s horrific last charade through a nightmare L.A. that he served to create — and as he confronts his complicity and his own raging madness.
It’s the Summer of ’62, baby. Freddy O’s got a hot date with history. The savage Sixties are ready to pop. It’s just a shot away.
The Enchanters is a transcendent work of American popular fiction. It is James Ellroy at his most crazed, brilliant, provocative, profanely hilarious, and stop-your-heart tender. It is a luminous psychological drama and an unparalleled thrill ride. It is, resoundingly, the great American crime novel.
Blood's A Rover
by James Ellroy
Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian countermeasures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History.
Dwight Holly is J. Edgar Hoover’s pet strong-arm goon, implementing Hoover’s racist designs and obsessed with a leftist shadow figure named Joan Rosen Klein. Wayne Tedrow—ex-cop and heroin runner—is building a mob gambling mecca in the Dominican Republic and quickly becoming radicalized. Don Crutchfield is a window-peeping kid private-eye within tantalizing reach of right-wing assassins, left-wing revolutionaries and the powermongers of an incendiary era. Their lives collide in pursuit of the Red Goddess Joan—and each of them will pay “a dear and savage price to live History.”
Political noir as only James Ellroy can write it—our recent past razed and fully reconstructed—Blood’s A Rover is a novel of astonishing depth and scope, a massive tale of corruption and retribution, of ideals at war and the extremity of love. It is the largest and greatest work of fiction from an American master.
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The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand; Introduction by Thomas Mallon (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
by James Ellroy
"America was never innocent."
Thus begins the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. It's James Ellroy's pop history of the 1960s, his window-peeper's view of government misconduct, his dirty trickster's take on the great events of an incendiary era. It's a tour de force of the American idiom, and an acknowledged masterpiece.
American Tabloid gives us Jack Kennedy's ride, seen from an insider's perspective. We're there for the rigged 1960 election. We're there for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. We're the eyes and ears and souls of three rogue cops who've signed on for the ride and come to see Jack as their betrayer. We're Jack's pimps and hatchet men, and we're there for that baroque slaying in Dallas.
The Cold Six Thousand takes us from Dallas to Vietnam to Memphis to the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. We're rubbing shoulders with RFK and MLK, calamitous klansmen, noted mafiosi. We're forced to relive the American sixties--and we come away breathless.
The first two books of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy revisit the most anarchic decade in our history. They are defined by their brutal linguistic flair and reckless panache.
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Suicide Hill
by James Ellroy
Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins is the most brilliant homicide detective in the Los Angeles Police Department and one of its most troubled. In his obsessive mission to protect the innocent, there is no line he won’t cross. Estranged from his wife and daughters and on the verge of being drummed out of the department for his transgressions, Hopkins is assigned to investigate a series of bloody bank robberies. As the violence escalates and the case becomes ever more vicious, Hopkins will be forced to cross the line once again to stop a maniac on a murder binge.
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Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting
by James Ellroy, Bruce Wagner, Ralph Rugoff, Alexandra Schwartz, Ulrich Wilmes
Transforming words into icons and images into wide-screen epics, Ed Ruscha has wholly reconceived the terms of painting for our era. Tagged variously as a Conceptualist, Pop artist or latter-day Surrealist, Ruscha flouts category, or rather incorporates all categories, always surprising and experimenting with both subject and method. His paintings are steeped in our times: cinema, advertising, logos, late capitalism and the twists and turns of postwar art have all informed his iconography since the early 1960s, arriving on the cool surfaces of his canvases with magnetic detachment. Ruscha eschews process and focuses exclusively on the final product: “the means to the end has always been secondary in my art,” he has said. Ruscha has also reinvented the use of words in art, finding disquieting ways to invest language with a weird, throbbing, ambient static, never aspiring to what he calls “word gestures,” since “each word is an excursion unto itself.” Fifty Years of Painting focuses on Ruscha's majestic oeuvre of paintings. A magnificent publication, it comes housed in a slipcase that sports the artist's classic painting “Standard Station” (1966), and, alongside fantastic reproductions, it contains a preface by novelist James Ellroy, essays by Ralph Rugoff, Alexandra Schwartz and Ulrich Wilmes, a text by novelist Bruce Wagner, an interview with the artist by Kristine McKenna, an illustrated chronology and an exhibition history.
Ed Ruscha (born 1937) has made pioneering work in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, bookmaking, photography and film since 1958. Associated in the early 1960s with the Ferus Gallery, Ruscha was included in Walter Hopps' landmark Pop art show New Painting of Common Objects, at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962.
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The Black Dahlia (L. A. Quartet)
by James Ellroy
The first novel in The L.A. Quartet. The Black Dahlia is the haunting and harrowing book that put James Ellroy on the map as one of the most electrifying writers on the scene.
On January 15, 1947, the brutally mutilated body of Elizabeth Short is found in a vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia, becoming the center of a media frenzy and cultural fixation.
Caught up in the investigation are two young cops, Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert and Lee Blanchard, partners in uniform and both former boxers. But the deeper they get in the case, the greater their obsession with the Dahlia becomes. As the two men go rogue and hunt for the killer, they are drawn into the hellish underbelly of 1940s Hollywood, into the victim’s twisted past, and into the extremes of their own desires—a land of demons and madness.
Inspired by America’s most infamous unsolved murder, James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia is a classic work of crime fiction that will haunt its readers long after the last page.
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The Big Nowhere
by James Ellroy
The second novel in The L.A. Quartet. Murder, mayhem and dirty cops on the make against the backdrop of anti-communist hysteria in L.A. in 1950.
It’s Los Angeles in the new year of 1950. The Communist Scare is heating up. Gangsters vie for control of the town. The Hollywood studios are feuding with the unions.
Then a dead body with its eyes gouged out turns up.
The investigating officer, Sheriff’s deputy Danny Upshaw, is obsessed with the murder case that no one else cares about. LAPD Lieutenant Mal Considine jumps onto the Red Scare bandwagon to advance his career and gain custody of his adopted son. And Buzz Meeks is in it all for the money.
The three cops get caught in the city’s web of ambition, perversion, and deceit. All three have purchased tickets to a nightmare.
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The L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz; Introduction by Tom Nolan (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
by James Ellroy
Here in one volume is James Ellroy's first great body of work, an epic re-envisioning of postwar Los Angeles--etched in red and black and film-noir grays.
The Black Dahlia depicts the secret infrastructure of L.A.'s most sensational murder case. A young cop morphs into obsessed lover and lust-crazed avenger. The Dahlia claims him. She is the deus ex machina of a boomtown in extremis. The cop's rogue investigation is a one-way ticket to hell.
The Big Nowhere blends the crime novel and the political novel. It is winter, 1950--and the L.A. County Grand Jury is out to slam movieland Reds. It's a reverential shuck--and the three cops assigned to the job are out to grab all the glory they can. A series of brutal sex killings intervenes, and the job goes all-the-way bad.
L.A. Confidential is the great novel of Los Angeles in the 1950s. Political corruption. Scandal-rag journalism. Bad racial juju and gangland wars. Six local stiffs slaughtered in an all-night hash house. The glorious and overreaching LAPD on an unprecedented scale.
White Jazz gives us the tortured confession of a corrupt cop going down for the count. He's a slumlord, a killer, a parasitic exploiter. He's a pawn in a series of police power plays and starting to see that he's being had. He's just met a woman. Thus, he's determined to claw his way out of the horrifying world he's created--and he's determined to tell us everything.
The L.A. Quartet is a groundbreaking work of American popular fiction.
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My Dark Places
by James Ellroy
The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy presents another literary masterpiece, this time a true crime murder mystery about his own mother.
In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself.
In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten--and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.
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L.A. Confidential (L. A. Quartet)
by James Ellroy
The third novel in The L.A. Quartet. L.A. Confidential is one of the most beloved and influential crime novels ever written.
“Nobody in this generation matches the breadth and depth of James Ellroy’s way with noir.” —Detroit News
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. Three LAPD detectives get involved: Ed Exley wants to eclipse his policeman father’s success. Bud White watched his own mother’s murder—and is now a time bomb with a badge. Jack Vincennes shakes down movie stars for a scandal magazine.
These events will expose the guilty secrets on which they have built their corrupt and violent careers. The three men are caught in a deadly spiral, a nightmare that tests loyalty and courage, and offers no mercy, grants no survivors.
L.A. Confidential is one of the most beloved and influential crime novels ever written.
“Faster than a stray bullet. . . . Ellroy spares no sensibilities.” —Los Angeles Times
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Perfidia: A novel
by James Ellroy
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
It is December 6, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal Japanese-Americans—but now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins.
The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. William H. Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police Department. He’s superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up, and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith—Irish émigré, ex-IRA killer, fledgling war profiteer. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. Kay Lake is a twenty-one-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. The investigation throws them together and rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm center that brilliantly illuminates these four driven souls—comrades, rivals, lovers, history’s pawns.
Perfidia is a novel of astonishments. It is World War II as you have never seen it, and Los Angeles as James Ellroy has never written it before. Here, he gives us the party at the edge of the abyss and the precipice of America’s ascendance. Perfidia is that moment, spellbindingly captured. It beckons us to solve a great crime that, in its turn, explicates the crime of war itself. It is a great American novel.
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The Hilliker Curse
by James Ellroy
The New York Times bestselling crime writer and author of The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential gives us a searing, candid memoir about his obsession with women, his related search for atonement, and his remarkable literary career. • “Forceful and unsparing in its revelations.... Marvelous fury, passion and energy.” —San Francisco Chronicle
The year was 1958. Jean Hilliker had divorced her hustler husband and resurrected her maiden name. Her son, James, was ten years old. In a dark moment, he “summoned her dead.” Three months later she was murdered. The curse was evoked, and James Ellroy began his unending pursuit of women. Here, he unsparingly describes his shattered childhood, his delinquent teens, his writing life, his love affairs and marriages, his nervous breakdown, and the beginning of a relationship with an extraordinary woman who may just be the long-sought Her. A startling revelation, a treatise on guilt and the power of malediction, and above all, a heartfelt confession, The Hilliker Curse is a brilliant, soul-baring revelation of self.
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White Jazz
by James Ellroy
The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia.
Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns--it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer--a power in his own small corner of hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire.
Klein's been hung out as bait, "a bad cop to draw the heat," and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, from racketeers and drug kingpins--all of them hell-bent on keeping their own secrets hidden. For Klein, "forty-two and going on dead," it's dues time.
Klein tells his own story--his voice clipped, sharp, often as brutal as the events he's describing--taking us with him on a journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, avarice, and perversion. It's a world he created, but now he'll do anything to get out of it alive.
Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor edge, White Jazz is crime fiction at its most shattering.
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The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume II Blood's A Rover
by James Ellroy
The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy concludes. We've traversed the interlocked conspiracies of the decade and are there for the wind-up and swan songs.
Blood's A Rover takes us into the seventies. MLK and RFK are dead. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago has spawned chaos. There's a punk-kid private eye in L.A. He's clashing with a mob goon and an enforcer for J. Edgar Hoover. There's an armored-car heist and a cache of missing emeralds. There's bad voodoo in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Amidst it all is a revolutionary, Joan Rosen Klein. The kid P.I., the mob goon, and Hoover's enforcer love her unto death. Blood's A Rover gives us the private nightmare of public policy on an epic scale.
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The Enchanters A novel
by James Ellroy
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • James Ellroy—Demon Dog of American Letters—goes straight to the tragic heart of 1962 Hollywood with a wild riff on the Marilyn Monroe death myth in an astonishing, behind-the-headlines crime epic.
“James Ellroy, the neo-noir eminence of L.A. crime fiction, is back, with his favorite snake, Fred Otash, in tow. . . . And he sure can shoulder a novel." —Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker
Los Angeles, August 4, 1962. The city broils through a midsummer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash.
The freewheeling Freddy O: tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is love.” Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe’s death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle. We are with him as he tears through all those who block his path to the truth. We are with him as he penetrates the faux-sunshine of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the shuck of Camelot. We are with him as he falters, and grasps for love beyond opportunity. We are with him as he tracks Marilyn Monroe’s horrific last charade through a nightmare L.A. that he served to create — and as he confronts his complicity and his own raging madness.
It’s the Summer of ’62, baby. Freddy O’s got a hot date with history. The savage Sixties are ready to pop. It’s just a shot away.
The Enchanters is a transcendent work of American popular fiction. It is James Ellroy at his most crazed, brilliant, provocative, profanely hilarious, and stop-your-heart tender. It is a luminous psychological drama and an unparalleled thrill ride. It is, resoundingly, the great American crime novel.
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The Cold Six Thousand A Novel
by James Ellroy
The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz, American Tabloid... James Ellroy's high-velocity, best-selling novels have redefined noir for our age, propelling us within inches of the dark realities of America's recent history. Now, in The Cold Six Thousand, his most ambitious and explosive novel yet, he puts the whole of the 1960s under his blistering lens. The result is a work of fierce, epic fiction, a speedball through our most tumultuous time.
It begins in Dallas. November 22, 1963. 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 Kennedy's 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 back 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 ...
Tedrow stands witness, as the icons of an iconic era mingle with cops, killers, hoods, and provocateurs. His story is ground zero in Ellroy's stunning vision: historical confluence as American Nightmare.
The Cold Six Thousand is a masterpiece.
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Los Seductores / the Enchanters
by James Ellroy
Regresa «El Dostoievski americano» (Joyce Carol Oates) con su controvertida versión de la muerte de Marilyn Monroe.
«Nadie hace novelas criminales como él. Una de las mejores obras de Ellroy en años».--Dan Jones, The Sunday Times
4 de agosto de 1962. Los Ángeles está que hierve, en medio de una intensa ola de calor. Una estrella de cine B ha sido secuestrada en extrañas circunstancias. Y acaban de encontrar el cuerpo sin vida de Marilyn Monroe. ¿Sobredosis, suicidio, asesinato? El jefe de policía William H. Parker pone sobre la pista a Freddy Otash, expolicía corrupto y extorsionador, que no tardará en intuir que ambos casos están relacionados. Pero, si quiere salvar su propio pellejo no puede limitarse a descubrir la verdad: deberá encontrar pruebas que alejen a los Kennedy de los rumores de asesinato. Otash investigará la última y terrible farsa que rodeó a Marilyn y sacará a la luz la vida oculta del mito, en medio de la pesadilla de los bajos fondos del Hollywood que el propio Otash contribuyó a crear.
Los seductores es otra gran novela americana, una trascendental, provocadora, trepidante, ingeniosa e irreverente nueva obra del indiscutible rey del noir, que aquí encontramos en plena forma. Definida por The Sunday Times como «una de las mejores obras Ellroy en años», la nueva novela del «perro diabólico» es una nueva pieza fundamental de su fascinante y célebre universo.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR * James Ellroy--Demon Dog of American Letters--goes straight to the tragic heart of 1962 Hollywood with a wild riff on the Marilyn Monroe death myth in an astonishing, behind-the-headlines crime epic.
"James Ellroy, the neo-noir eminence of L.A. crime fiction, is back, with his favorite snake, Fred Otash, in tow. . . . And he sure can shoulder a novel." --Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker
Los Angeles, August 4, 1962. The city broils through a midsummer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker's looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash.
The freewheeling Freddy O: tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim "Opportunity is love." Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe's death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle. We are with him as he tears through all those who block his path to the truth. We are with him as he penetrates the faux-sunshine of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the shuck of Camelot. We are with him as he falters, and grasps for love beyond opportunity. We are with him as he tracks Marilyn Monroe's horrific last charade through a nightmare L.A. that he served to create -- and as he confronts his complicity and his own raging madness.
It's the Summer of '62, baby. Freddy O's got a hot date with history. The savage Sixties are ready to pop. It's just a shot away.
The Enchanters is a transcendent work of American popular fiction. It is James Ellroy at his most crazed, brilliant, provocative, profanely hilarious, and stop-your-heart tender. It is a luminous psychological drama and an unparalleled thrill ride. It is, resoundingly, the great American crime novel.
Copies
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Red Sheet: A Novel
by James Ellroy
Turn to the first page and disavow what you think you know. This is 1960s Los Angeles like you’ve never seen it before, in a daring work of historical fiction from bestselling author of The Enchanters and Widespread Panic.
It’s late October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just concluded. The U.S. prevailed. Attorney General Robert Kennedy fears reprisals from domestic Communist Party members embedded in L.A. He orders a red probe and puts the LAPD on the job.
Freddy Otash is named lead investigator. He encounters commie malfeasance at every turn. He homes in on a red-front trade union. There’s a murder on Halloween night. It links to ex-VP and gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon and possibly two homicides eight years back. Now Freddy is working double duty: he’s commanding the probe and is hired to keep Nixon out of trouble. Meanwhile, integrationist fever is sweeping L.A. and the police department comes under its fire. Ex-cop/lawyer Tom Bradley is running for city council and pushing the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Playboy kingpin Hugh Hefner is along for the ride. And the long-forgotten but still-stunning folk singer Judy Henske is on a collision course with the love of her life, the freewheeling Freddy O.
The stage is set for chaos and Freddy thrives on chaos. Red Sheet is a work of subversive art. It embodies “indigenous American beserk” with a uniquely crazed and brilliant passion.
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$35.00