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James Ellroy (born Lee Earle Ellroy on March 4, 1948 in Los Angeles, California) is an American writer.

He is one of the world's best-selling crime writers and essayists with a unique "telegraphic" writing style, which omits words other writers would consider necessary, and often features sentence fragments. His books are noted for their dark humor and depiction of American authoritarianism. Other hallmarks of his work include dense plotting and a relentlessly pessimistic worldview. Ellroy has sometimes been called the "Demon Dog of American crime fiction".

Biography

In 1958, his mother, Geneva, whom Ellroy has stated he lusted after, was murdered in El Monte, where she and Ellroy moved three years after her divorce from his father, Armand. The unsolved killing, and a birthday present from his father a few months later, The Badge by Jack Webb (a book about the Los Angeles Police Department), were pivotal moments in his life as related in his autobiography My Dark Places.

The autobiography My Dark Places was begun in 1994 after Ellory's friend, Frank C. Girardot, a reporter for The San Gabriel Valley Tribune, accessed files on the murder from the detectives with Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

In the afterword to the 2006 re-issue of his book The Black Dahlia, Ellroy confesses feeling sexually attracted to his mother and that he would attempt to spy on her during intercourse. His inability to come to terms with or understand these feelings led him to transfer them onto another murder victim, Elizabeth Short; throughout his youth, Ellroy used Short as a surrogate for his conflicting emotions and desires.

In his teens and twenties, Ellroy drank heavily, engaged in some crimes (especially shoplifting 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 his writing. 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."[1]

He writes longhand on legal pads, rather than on a computer, and prepares elaborate outlines for his books that are several hundred pages long. In connection with The Cold Six Thousand Ellroy has said that he is through with "genre fiction" and plans to write mainstream novels.

Ellroy is an ardent, 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 G. King beating and Rampart police scandals were overblown by a biased liberal media. Although he generally appears to be a conservative, some of his habits and opinions are not typically conservative: he is a strict vegetarian, he opposes the death penalty, favors gun control, and was even a friend and admirer of the works of the late Edward Bunker.

Prior to 1995, Ellroy lived in Los Angeles, California, having divorced his wife, Helen Knode, who authored the 2003 novel The Ticket Out. In 1995 he moved to Mission Hills, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City. He is currently working on the final (and reportedly largest) volume of his Underworld USA trilogy of novels, which began with American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. Ellroy says it has a title but that title is not the reported one of "Police Gazette." The novel is due for release in late 2007.

Ellroy wrote an autobiographical essay for the West magazine (included with the Sunday L.A. Times) that was distributed on Sunday, July 30th, 2006. In it he detailed his relationship with the city he returned to (again) in early June 2006. He also divulged that he is recently divorced (again), but that he and Helen continue a "steel-buffed friendship."

Ellroy was disappointed by the film "Cop" (starring James Woods) as an adaptation of one of his novels. He was then astonished by Curtis Hanson's depiction of his novel "L.A. Confidential." On a making of piece on the L.A. Confidential DVD, he says that Hanson and Brian Helgeland, the film's screenwriters, "brilliantly adapted" his book, and that he was "flabberghasted" by what was done with it. Prior to viewing the completed film of "The Black Dahlia" (based on his book of the same name) he had praised it as a brilliantly depicted film after watching hours of unedited footage of the film. Ultimately, nearly an hour of the three-hour film, which linked events and facts together, was cut from the final version.

Films

• 1988 Cop
• 1997 L.A. Confidential
• 1998 Brown's Requiem
• 2002 Stay Clean
• 2002 Dark Blue
• 2006 The Black Dahlia
• 2008 The Night Watchman

Documentaries

• 1993 James Ellroy: Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction
• 2001 James Ellroy's Feast of Death

Bibliography

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

Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy

• 1984 Blood on the Moon
• 1984 Because the Night
• 1985 Suicide Hill

L.A. Quartet

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

American Underworld Trilogy

• 1995 American Tabloid
• 2001 The Cold Six Thousand
• 2007(?) untitled -- but not, says Ellroy, Police Gazette

Short Stories and Essays

• 1994 Hollywood Nocturnes (AKA, Dick Contino's Blues)
• 1999 Crime Wave
• 2004 Destination: Morgue!

Autobiography

• 1996 My Dark Places

Guest editor

• 2002 The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

See also

• Dragnet (series)

External links

• Ellroy.com
• Ellroy Confidential
• James Ellroy's World
• 1987 Audio Interview by Don Swaim
• James Ellroy:Breakneck Pace In particular, refers to a 2000 MSNBC interview in which he changed his mind publicly about the death penalty.
• James Ellroy interviewed by Robert Birnbaum at identitytheory.com
• CNN interview with James Ellroy

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