James Ellroy
Occupation	novelist
Nationality	American
Genre	crime fiction, historical, mystery, noir

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

Ellroy has become known for a so-called "telegraphic" prose style of his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences.^[1] For instance:

They sent him to Dallas to kill a nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee. He wasn't sure he could do it. The Casino Operators Council flew him. They supplied first-class fare. They tapped their slush fund. They greased him. They fed him six cold.^[2]

Other hallmarks of his work include dense plotting and a relentlessly pessimistic—albeit moral—worldview.^[3][4] His work has earned Ellroy the nickname the "Demon Dog of American crime fiction."^[5]

Ellroy was born in 1948 in Los Angeles, California. After his parents' divorce, Ellroy and his mother, Geneva Hilliker, relocated to El Monte, California. In 1958, Ellroy's mother was murdered. The police never arrested the perpetrator, and the case remains unsolved. The murder, along with The Badge by Jack Webb (a book composed of sensational cases from the files of the Los Angeles Police Department, a birthday gift from his father), were important events of Ellroy's youth.^[6]

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, the "Black Dahlia"; throughout his youth, Ellroy used Short as a surrogate for his conflicting emotions and desires.^[7] These confusions led to a period of intense clinical depression, from which he recovered only gradually.^[6]

Ellroy dropped out of school without graduating. During his teens and twenties, he drank heavily, engaged in minor crimes (especially shoplifting, house-breaking and burglary), and was often homeless. After serving some time in jail and suffering a bout of pneumonia, Ellroy stopped drinking and began working as a golf caddy while pursuing writing.^[6] He later said, "Caddying was good tax-free cash and allowed me to get home by 2 p.m. and write books... I caddied right up to the sale of my fifth book."^[8]

In 1981, Ellroy published his first novel, Brown's Requiem, a detective story drawing on his experiences as a caddy.^[9] 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, three novels following the eponymous character.

While his early novels earned him a "cult" following, Ellroy earned much greater success and critical acclaim with the L.A. Quartet—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz.^[4] The four novels represent Ellroy's change of style from the tradition of classic modernist noir fiction of his earlier novels to so-called postmodern historiographic metafiction.^[10] The Black Dahlia, for example, fused the real-life murder of Elizabeth Short with a fictional story of two police officers investigating the crime.^[11]

In 1995, Ellroy published American Tabloid, the first novel in a series informally dubbed the "Underworld USA Trilogy",^[3] which Ellroy describes as a "secret history" of the mid-to-late twentieth century.^[4] Tabloid was named TIME's fiction book of year for 1995. Its follow-up, The Cold Six Thousand, became a bestseller.^[3] The final novel, Blood's a Rover, will be released on September 22, 2009.

After publishing American Tabloid, Ellroy began a memoir, My Dark Places based on his memories of his mother's murder and his investigation of the crime.^[6] In the memoir, Ellroy mentions that his mother's murder received little news coverage, and the media was still fixated on Johnny Stompanato's murder. Frank C. Girardot, a reporter for The San Gabriel Valley Tribune, accessed files on Geneva Hilliker Ellroy's murder from detectives with Los Angeles Police Department.^[6] Based on the cold case file, Ellroy and investigator Bill Stoner worked the case, but gave up after fifteen months, believing any suspects to be dead.^[6]

After a second marriage in the mid-90s to Helen Knode (author of the 2003 novel The Ticket Out),^[12] the couple moved from California to Kansas City in 1995.^[13] In 2006, after their divorce, Ellroy returned to Los Angeles.^[14] He is a self-described hermit who possesses very few technological amenities, including television, and never reads books by other authors, aside from Joseph Wambaugh's The Onion Field, for fear that they might influence his own.^[15]

Ellroy is an outspoken and unquestioning admirer of the Los Angeles Police Department, and he dismisses the department's flaws as aberrations, telling the National Review that the coverage of the Rodney King beating and Rampart police scandals were overblown by a biased media.^[16]

In media appearances, Ellroy has adopted an outsized, stylized public persona of hard-boiled nihilism and self-reflexive subversiveness.^[4] He frequently begins public appearances with a monologue such as:

Good evening peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps. I'm James Ellroy, the demon dog, the foul owl with the death growl, the white knight of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. I'm the author of 16 books, masterpieces all; they precede all my future masterpieces. These books will leave you reamed, steamed and drycleaned, tie-dyed, swept to the side, true-blued, tattooed and bah fongooed. These are books for the whole fuckin' family, if the name of your family is the Manson Family.^[17]

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."^[18]

Ellroy generally espouses conservative political views, ranging from vague anti-liberalism to authoritarianism.^[4] Like other aspects of his persona, however, it is unclear where his public persona ends and his actual views begin; 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.^[13] (Privately, he opposes the death penalty and favors gun control.)^[19] Indeed, Ellroy told one interviewer that, with respect to some of the more controversial opinions he has expressed in his books and elsewhere, "there's just some part of me that's immature, that likes fucking over people and pissing them off."^[4]

Ellroy writes longhand on legal pads, rather than on a computer,^[20] and prepares elaborate outlines for his books, most of which are several hundred pages long.^[4]

Dialog and narration in Ellroy novels often consists of a "heightened pastiche of jazz slang, cop patois, creative profanity[,] and drug vernacular," with a particular use of period-appropriate, but now anachronistic, slang.^[21] He often employs stripped-down staccato sentence structures, a style that reaches its apex in The Cold Six Thousand, and which Ellroy describes as a "direct, shorter-rather-than-longer sentence style that's declarative and ugly and right there, punching you in the nards."^[4] While each sentence on its own is simple, the cumulative effect is a dense, baroque style.^[21]

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.^[11]

A predominant theme of Ellory's work is the myth of "closure." "Closure is bullshit," Ellroy often remarks, "and I would love to find the man who invented closure and shove a giant closure plaque up his ass."^[22]

Ellroy has claimed that he is done with noir crime novels. "I write big political books now," he says. "I want to write about LA exclusively for the rest of my career. I don't know where and when."^[23]

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 have been penned 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,^[24] 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?”^[13]

Shortly after viewing three hours of unedited footage^[25] for Brian De Palma's adaptation of The Black Dahlia, Ellroy wrote an essay, "Hillikers," praising De Palma and his film.^[26] Ultimately, nearly an hour was removed from the final cut, and the film was a commercial and critical disappointment. 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."^[21]

In 2008, Daily Variety reported that HBO, along with Tom Hanks's production company, Playtone, were developing Tabloid and Six-Thousand (and, presumably after publication, Blood's a Rover) for either a mini-series or ongoing series.^[27]

Ellory co-wrote the original screenplay for the 2008 film Street Kings, but refused to do any publicity for the finished film.^[21]

• Brown's Requiem (1981)
• Clandestine (1982)
• Killer on the Road (originally published as Silent Terror) (1986)

• Blood on the Moon (1984)
• Because the Night (1984)
• Suicide Hill (1985)
• L.A. Noir (omnibus edition) (1998)

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

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

• Dick Contino's Blues (issue number 46 of Granta magazine, Winter 1994)
• Hollywood Nocturnes (1994; UK title: Dick Contino's Blues and Other Stories)
• Crime Wave (1999)
• Destination: Morgue! (2004)

• My Dark Places (1996)

• The Best American Mystery Stories 2002 (2002)

• 1993 James Ellroy: Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction
• 2001 James Ellroy's Feast of Death
• 2006 Murder By The Book: James Ellroy

• 1988 Cop
• 1997 L.A. Confidential
• 1998 Brown's Requiem
• 2002 Stay Clean
• 2002 Dark Blue
• 2006 The Black Dahlia
• 2008 Street Kings
• 2008 Land of the Living
• 2009 White Jazz

• 1992 "Since I Don't Have You" adapted by Steven A. Katz for Showtime's Fallen Angels.

• Dragnet (series)

• James Ellroy at IMDb
• James Ellroy interviewed by Robert Birnbaum at identitytheory.com
• CNN interview with James Ellroy
• FilmThreat interview by Tony DuShane
• Website dedicated to the work of James Ellroy
• James Ellroy at the Internet Book List
• Ellroy on Dashiell Hammett
• Blackbird's Nest — "An Evening With James Ellroy"