James Ellroy

Lee Earle "James" Ellroy (born March 4, 1948) is an American crime fiction writer and essayist.

Life Early life Lee Earle "James" Ellroy was born in Los Angeles. His mother, Geneva Odelia (née Hilliker), was a nurse. His father, Armand, was an accountant and a onetime business manager of Rita Hayworth. His parents divorced in 1954, after which Ellroy and his mother moved to El Monte, California.

At the age of seven, Ellroy saw his mother naked and began to sexually fantasize about her. He struggled in youth with this obsession, as he held a psycho-sexual relationship with her, and tried to catch glimpses of her nude. Ellroy stated that "I lived for naked glimpses. I hated her and lusted for her..."

On June 22, 1958, when Ellroy was 10 years old, his mother was raped and murdered. His father was more permissive and allowed Ellroy to do as he pleased, namely be "left alone to read, to go out and peep through windows, prowl around and sniff the air."

Ellroy's inability to come to terms with the emotions surrounding his mother's murder led him to transfer them onto another murder victim, Elizabeth Short. Nicknamed the "Black Dahlia," Short was a young woman murdered in 1947, her body cut in half and discarded in Los Angeles, in a notorious and unsolved crime. Throughout his youth, Ellroy used Short as a surrogate for his conflicting emotions and desires. His confusion and trauma led to a period of intense clinical depression, from which he recovered only gradually.

Early career After being expelled from high school, Ellroy then joined the U.S. Army for a short period of time. On enlisting, Ellroy soon decided he did not belong there and convinced an army psychiatrist he was unfit for combat. He was discharged after three months.

Ellroy credits the public libraries of Los Angeles County as the basis of his writing. He shelved books at the public library. In a speech at the Library of Congress in 2019 he declared: "I am a product of the L.A. County Public Library System." During his teens and 20s, Ellroy drank heavily and abused Benzedrex inhalers. He was engaged in minor crimes (especially shoplifting, house-breaking, and burglary) and was often homeless. After serving some time in jail and suffering from pneumonia, during which he developed an abscess on his lung "the size of a large man's fist," Ellroy stopped drinking and began working as a golf caddie while pursuing writing. Ellroy has also summed up his life by saying: "Boy's mother murdered. Boy's life shattered. Boy grows up homeless alcoholic jailbird. Jailbird cleans up and writes his way to salvation. Jailbird becomes the Mad Dog of American Crime Fiction."

Personal life On October 4, 1991, Ellroy married writer and critic Helen Knode. The couple moved from California to Kansas City in 1995. In 2006, after their divorce, Ellroy returned to Los Angeles. The two later reconciled and moved to Denver, although Ellroy has stated that they live in separate apartments in the same building. He frequently tells interviewers that the issue for him is not monogamy, but cohabitation.

Ellroy joined Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1970s.

Literary career In 1981, Ellroy published his first novel, Brown's Requiem, a detective story drawing on his experiences as a caddie. He then published Clandestine and Silent Terror (which was later published under the title Killer on the Road). Ellroy followed these three novels with the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy. The novels are centered on Hopkins, a brilliant but disturbed LAPD robbery-homicide detective, and are set mainly in the 1980s.

He is a self-described recluse who possesses very few technological amenities, including television, and claims never to read contemporary books by other authors, aside from Joseph Wambaugh's The Onion Field, out of concern that they might influence his own. However, this does not mean that Ellroy does not read at all, as he claims in My Dark Places to have read at least two books a week growing up, eventually shoplifting more to satisfy his love of reading. He then goes on to say that he read works by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Writing style Hallmarks of his work include dense plotting and a relentlessly pessimistic—albeit moral—worldview. His work has earned Ellroy the nickname "Demon dog of American crime fiction."

Ellroy writes longhand on legal pads rather than on a computer. He prepares elaborate outlines for his books, most of which are several hundred pages long. He often employs a sort of telegraphese (stripped-down, staccato-like sentence structures), a style that reaches its apex in The Cold Six Thousand. Ellroy describes it as a "direct, shorter-rather-than-longer sentence style that's declarative and ugly and right there, punching you in the nards." The Black Dahlia, for example, fused the real-life murder of Elizabeth Short with a fictional story of two police officers investigating the crime.

Underworld USA Trilogy

In 1995, Ellroy published American Tabloid, the first novel in a series informally dubbed the "Underworld USA Trilogy" In 2008, The Library of America selected the essay "My Mother's Killer" from My Dark Places for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.

Other Ellroy began a "Second L.A. Quartet" taking place during the Second World War, with some characters from the first L.A. Quartet and the Underworld USA Trilogy reappearing in younger depictions. The first book, Perfidia, was released on September 9, 2014. The second book is titled This Storm, which had a release date of May 14, 2019. It was released on May 30, 2019, in the United Kingdom, and June 4, 2019, in the United States.

In 2023, at the LA Times Festival of Books, Ellroy revealed, in light of his latest book The Enchanters and his editors' response to it, that his planned "Second L.A. Quartet" would become a quintet, with The Enchanters being the third of five books in the series. The later books in the series will be set in the 1960s and will tie back in to the World War II setting, Japanese internment and the immediate post-war setting initially established in Perfidia and This Storm.

A Waterstones exclusive limited edition of Perfidia was published two days after its initial release and included an essay by Ellroy titled "Ellroy's History—Then and Now". . Ellroy dedicated Perfidia "To Lisa Stafford". The epigraph is "Envy thou not the oppressor, And choose none of his ways" from Proverbs 3:31.

In collaboration with the Los Angeles Police Museum and Glynn Martin, the museum's executive director, Ellroy released LAPD '53 on May 19, 2015. Photography from the museum's archives are presented alongside Ellroy's writings about crime and law enforcement during that era.

In the fall of 2017, Ellroy investigated the murder of Sal Mineo. Reminiscent of how he investigated his mother's unsolved murder, Ellroy worked with Glynn Martin, an ex-LAPD officer, the LAPD Museum's current executive director, and co-author of LAPD '53. Ellroy wrote about this investigation for The Hollywood Reporter in digital form on December 21, 2018, and it also appeared in published form in the December 18, 2018, issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

Early in January 2019, Ellroy posted news on jamesellroy.net, writing: "I'm digitally illiterate, so you’ve got to gas on the fact that I'm breaking baaaaaaaaad from tradition, in order to post this announcement." Ellroy posted that he had been inducted into the Everyman's Library series. Three Everyman's Library editions have been reprinted: The L.A. Quartet, The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I and The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume II. The release dates for these editions, as well as This Storm: A Novel, was June 4, 2019. Ellroy added, "Stay stirringly tuned to this website for further updates", and simply signed the finished post Ellroy, inserting a dog's pawprint below it.

In 2022, Ellroy, a long-time fan of Chester Himes, wrote the introduction to Himes's classic A Rage in Harlem. In his hard-bitten style, Ellroy raves that "A Rage in Harlem features a mind-mauling array of chump-change hustles, lurid larcenies, and malicious mischief." The novel was originally published in France in 1958, where it won France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and was most recently re-published by Vintage Books.

Public life and views In media appearances, Ellroy has adopted an outsized, stylized public persona of hard-boiled nihilism and self-reflexive subversiveness.

Another aspect of his public persona involves an almost comically grand assessment of his work and his place in literature. For example, he told The New York Times: "I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music."

Structurally, several of Ellroy's books, such as The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid, and The Cold Six Thousand, have three disparate points of view through different characters, with chapters alternating between them. Starting with The Black Dahlia, Ellroy's novels have mostly been historical dramas about the relationship between corruption and law enforcement. Ellroy often remarks, "and I would love to find the man who invented closure and shove a giant closure plaque up his ass." In his works characters often die or vanish quickly before otherwise traditional closure points in order to capitalize this idea.

In 2017, Ellroy claimed that he is done writing noir crime novels.

On April 29, 2015, Ellroy and Lois Duncan were the Grandmasters at the 2015 Edgar Awards.

Politics Ellroy has frequently espoused conservative political views. In 2019, Ellroy described himself as anti-totalitarian, conservative, and a Tory, adding "Underneath my profane exterior, I'm very concerned with decorum, with probity, with morality, and I have a painfully developed conscience. I despise unconscionable acts, whoever is perpetrating them."

In a 2009 interview, Ellroy said that in the 1960s and 1970s "I was never a peacemaker; I was a fuck-you right-winger." He has also been an outspoken and unquestioning admirer of the Los Angeles Police Department (despite his explicit depictions of brutality and corruption of the department in his novels), dismissing its flaws as aberrations. He has said that the Rodney King beating and Rampart police scandals were overblown by a biased media. Nevertheless, like other aspects of his persona, he often deliberately obscures where his public persona ends and his actual views begin. When asked about his "right-wing tendencies", he told an interviewer, "Right-wing tendencies? I do that to fuck with people." Similarly, in the film Feast of Death, his (now ex-) wife describes his politics as "bullshit", an assessment to which Ellroy responds only with a knowing smile.

In 2001, Ellroy stated that he is opposed to gun control. In the 2000 presidential election, Ellroy voted for George W. Bush "because I wanted to repudiate Gore and Clintonism and nobody hates Bill Clinton more than me..." In 2009, he called Bush a "slimeball and the most disastrous American president in recent times." He stated that he voted for Barack Obama,

Ellroy has frequently shared his thoughts on politicians and political candidates. He has called Hillary Clinton a "bull dyke in a pantsuit", compared John McCain to Mr. Magoo, Joe Biden to Daffy Duck, and said that "Obama looks like a f---ing lemur, a little rodent-like creature, a marsupial or something." He has praised President Ronald Reagan on several occasions, calling him a "titanic human being." On President Donald Trump, Ellroy stated that he "doesn't have the charm of a true, world-class dictator", but also understands his appeal, as "He's the big 'fuck you' to all pieties."

In 2022, Ellroy stated that he no longer followed contemporary politics.

However, in 2013, Ellroy stated "I'm a Christian. I'm not an Evangelical Christian, but God and religious spiritual feelings always guided me during the worst moments of my life, and I don't for a moment doubt it." In 2014, Ellroy stated that "I'm a Christian. I believe we are all one soul united in God", adding that he is "conservative and theocratic".

Ellroy has stated that his faith has influenced his novels, describing them as "stories of redemption."

Film adaptations and screenplays Several of Ellroy's works have been adapted to film, including Blood on the Moon (adapted as Cop), L.A. Confidential, Brown's Requiem, Killer on the Road/Silent Terror (adapted as Stay Clean), and The Black Dahlia. In each instance, screenplays based on Ellroy's work were written by other screenwriters.

While he has frequently been disappointed by these adaptations (such as Cop), he was very complimentary of Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland's screenplay for L.A. Confidential at the time of its release. In succeeding years, however, his comments have been more reserved:

L.A. Confidential, the movie, is the best thing that happened to me in my career that I had absolutely nothing to do with. It was a fluke—and a wonderful one—and it is never going to happen again—a movie of that quality.

Here's my final comment on L.A. Confidential, the movie: I go to a video store in Prairie Village, Kansas. The youngsters who work there know me as the guy who wrote L.A. Confidential. They tell all the little old ladies who come in there to get their G-rated family flick. They come up to me, they say, "OOOO... you wrote L.A. Confidential... Oh, what a wonderful, wonderful movie. I saw it four times. You don't see storytelling like that on the screen anymore." ...I smile, I say, "Yes, it's a wonderful movie, and a salutary adaptation of my wonderful novel. But listen, Granny: You love the movie. Did you go out and buy the book?" And Granny invariably says, "Well, no, I didn't." And I say to Granny, "Then what the fuck good are you to me?" for Brian De Palma's adaptation of The Black Dahlia, Ellroy wrote an essay, "Hillikers", praising De Palma and his film. Ultimately, nearly an hour was removed from the final cut. Of the released film, Ellroy told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "Look, you're not going to get me to say anything negative about the movie, so you might as well give up."

In a September 2009 interview, Ellroy himself stated, "All movie adaptations of my books are dead." In a November 2012 interview, when asked about how movie adaptations distort his books, he remarked, "[Film studios] can do whatever the [fuck] they want as long as they pay me."

In an October 2017 interview with The New York Times, Tom Hanks stated he would be interested in playing the part of Lloyd Hopkins if a film or stage adaptation was put into production.

In February 2024, it was reported Ellroy had signed on with Hollywood talent agency UTA and that producers were shopping around a film adaption of his then-latest novel The Enchanters.

Published works

Stand-alone novels Brown's Requiem (1981) Clandestine (1982) Killer on the Road (originally published as Silent Terror) (1986)

Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy Blood on the Moon (1984) Because the Night (1984) Suicide Hill (1986)

L.A. Quartet The Black Dahlia (1987) The Big Nowhere (1988) L.A. Confidential (1990) White Jazz (1992)

Underworld USA Trilogy

American Tabloid (1995) The Cold Six Thousand (2001) Blood's a Rover (2009)

L.A. Quintet (Formerly the Second L.A. Quartet) Perfidia (2014) This Storm (2019) The Enchanters (2023) Red Sheet (2026) LAPD '53 (2015)

Autobiography My Dark Places (1996) The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women (2010)

Editor The Best American Mystery Stories 2002 (2002) The Best American Crime Writing 2005 (2005) (Note: Part of The Best American Series)

2019 Everyman's Library Collections

The L.A. Quartet (2019)--collection of the LA Quartet as one volume. The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I (2019)--collection featuring American Tabloid and the Cold Six Thousand The Underworld U.S.A Trilogy, Volume II (2019)--collection featuring Blood's a Rover

Other works, influences, and adaptations L.A. Noir (1997)--omnibus collection of the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy

((Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy by Steven Powell - Published 2023.))

Filmography Documentaries 1993: James Ellroy: Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction 1995: White Jazz 2001: James Ellroy's Feast of Death 2005: James Ellroy: American Dog 2006: Murder by the Book: "James Ellroy" 2011: James Ellroy's L.A.: City of Demons

Films 1988: Cop 1997: L.A. Confidential 1998: Brown's Requiem 2002: Stay Clean 2002: Vakvagany 2002: Dark Blue 2003: Das Bus 2005: James Ellroy presents Bazaar Bizarre 2006: The Black Dahlia 2008: Street Kings 2008: Land of the Living 2011: Rampart

Television 1992: "Since I Don't Have You" adapted by Steven A. Katz for Showtime's Fallen Angels. 2011: James Ellroy's L.A.: City of Demons for Investigation Discovery.