James Ellroy

A master of noir crime fiction, James has up close and personal knowledge of the world of crime. His life has been shadowed by a gruesome event: the unsolved murder of his mother when he was a child. In 1958, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy's body was dumped on a roadway in El Monte, California, a seedy L.A. exurb. Her killer was never apprehended. Her murder unleashed a force that has propelled Ellroy's work. Ellroy channeled his anguish and transformed himself into an outsized public persona: an audacious, uncompromising, and unapologetic chronicler of humanity's dark side.

James Ellroy is masterly at speaking, his own backstory as riveting as any in fiction. Ellroy was born in 1948. He consumed crime novels as a young reader and developed an obsessive fascination with homicide after his father bought him Jack Webb's The Badge. In the book he discovered the story of the ghastly murder and mutilation of Elizabeth Short, known after her death as the Black Dahlia, whose murder and the subsequent investigation captivated the postwar imagination of the entire country.

As a young man haunted by his mother's death, Ellroy became a thief, an alcoholic, a drug abuser, and a peeping Tom. He served time in jail. Much of the first thirty years of his life was consumed by homelessness, alcoholism, drug abuse, petty crime, and a period of insanity. Ellroy eventually found steady work caddying at Los Angeles country clubs and joined AA. As he walked the golf courses while he worked, he harnessed his narrative passion to his fascination with crime and began to daydream a novel. In 1985 he began The Black Dahlia, an explicit attempt to marry his mother's murder to the famous case that had so obsessed him in his youth. The novel appeared in 1987 and was dedicated to his mother.

As a novelist, screenwriter, essayist, and memoirist, James Ellroy is more closely identified with Los Angeles than any writer since Raymond Chandler. Nearly all of his writing is set in Los Angeles, in the rough, racist, pre-Miranda Los Angeles of the decade following the Second World War. Four of his novels --- The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential (an Academy Award winning-movie), and White Jazz --- are collectively known as the L.A. Quartet. They comprise a dark and obsessive 1950s anti-history of his hometown. His novels American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's A Rover (September 2009) form the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, and American Tabloid and his memoir, My Dark Places, were both named as Time magazine's Best Book of the Year, respectively.

Curtis Hanson directed the blockbuster film adaptation of L.A. Confidential (1997) in which (as in the book), everything is suspect, everyone is for sale, and nothing is what it seems. The Black Dahlia, directed by Brian De Palma, was released in 2006. Ellroy himself has been the subject of seven documentary films, including Feast of Death, by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Vikram Jayanti.

Works by this Speaker

The Hilliker Curse

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. James Ellroy 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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Blood's A Rover

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 Cold Six Thousand

In this savagely audacious novel, James Ellroy plants a pipe bomb under the America in the 1960s, lights the fuse, and watches the shrapnel fly. On November 22, 1963 three men converge in Dallas. Their job: to clean up the JFK hit’s loose ends and inconvenient witnesses. They are Wayne Tedrow, Jr., a Las Vegas cop with family ties to the lunatic right; Ward J. Littell, a defrocked FBI man turned underworld mouthpiece; and Pete Bondurant, a dope-runner and hit-man who serves as the mob’s emissary to the anti-Castro underground.

It goes bad from there. For the next five years these night-riders run a whirlwind of plots and counter-plots: Howard Hughes’s takeover of Vegas, J. Edgar Hoover’s war against the civil rights movement, the heroin trade in Vietnam, and the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Wilder than L. A. Confidential, more devastating than American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand establishes Ellroy as one of our most fearless novelists.

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American Tabloid

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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The Black Dahlia

Bonus feature includes an original afterword by James Ellroy, titled "Hillikers," read by Stephen Hoye.

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. 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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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 three L. A. P. D. detectives involved, it will expose the guilty secrets on which they have built their corrupt and violent careers.

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