The Works of James Ellroy

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With the Black Dahlia adaptation coming out, I figured he should get his own thread. Talk about the demon dog of American literature here.

My Dark Places is the best memoir I've ever read. Brutal, honest, searing, yet still oddly touching. His style annoys some people, but I think it's lovely. He could kick James Frey's ass from here to Tulsa.

I came from it feeling like I really knew Jean Ellroy as an actual living person.

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Love the man. Brilliant writer. And I really wish he'd finish the sequel to American Tabloid/The Cold Six Thousand already.

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His writing always makes me feel dirty (not that that's a bad thing) but the couple of novels he wrote backgrounding the JFK assassination had way more truth in them than anything that came out of the Warren Commission.

[huntergrayson]

I really wish he'd finish the sequel to American Tabloid/The Cold Six Thousand already.

There was just an article on/by him in the LA Times' West magazine -- apparently he had a massive breakdown during the book tours for these, was a total insomniac, addicted to pills, etc. Heavy stuff, so he's just now "better" and able to write properly again.

I loved, loved, loved American Tabloid.

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Yeah, I was sad to read that he and Helen Knode had divorced.

I also love listening to him talk. He's one of the few authors who deserve to read their own audiobooks. He speaks exactly how you would want him to.

Here's the LA Times article he wrote over the summer.

It spooked me. It fear-juked my imagination. This new-L.A./non-L.A. was five-day-a-week exile. I pined for weekends in real-L.A. with my father. I was a kiddie captive in a straaaaange land. I wanted out. I got my wish on 6/22/58.

My mother was murdered. The crime was purely L.A.-adjacent. It was a hot Saturday night. She was out with a man. He strangled her and dumped her on an access road.

I was in the real-L.A./safe-L.A./now-non-safe-forever-L.A. that weekend. The central event of my life occurred off-page. The crime remains unsolved. Geneva Hilliker Ellroy is a ghost who haunts me in ellipsis and talks to me through flesh-and-blood women.

She has a younger sister whom I also hold dear. Betty Short ran to L.A. with the same heedless drive as Jean Hilliker. They rest dead as L.A. opportunists, and I have ceaselessly worked to recast them as L.A. immortals.

Our apartment was small and cramped. The three rooms reeked of dog residue. My father handed me my 11th birthday gift.

My mother was seven months dead. I survived the initial shock and regrouped faaaaast. I'd spent the last months of my mother's life devoured by anger and lust. She hit me once. I fell off the couch, gouged my head on a table edge and vowed never again. I loitered in the bathroom, poised for glimpses of her naked. I loved her scent. I poured her perfume on a wad of her underwear and carried it with me to smell her.

Now she was dead. Now there was no more church and homework. Now I had a life with my lazy father. Let's sleep late and short-shrift your schooling. Let's prowl and peep women in backlit bedroom windows. Let's shut your mother out with a callous child-opportunist's heart. Let's exult in how you overcame your maternal disadvantage.

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Bumping because I just picked up his latest, Destination: Morgue! which is actually a collection of his non-fiction GQ articles and then three or so original short stories at the end.

I was happy to see it had the piece that took my Elllroy virginity, "Stephanie." It was in GQ several years back and I still vividly remembered it. It's about Stephanie Lynn Gorman, a 16 year old middle class L.A. girl who was murdered by a stranger in her home in broad daylight after she came home from school one day in 1965. The murder remains unsolved.