New Releases by James Ellroy

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • James Ellroy—Demon Dog of American Letters—goes straight to the tragic heart of 1962 Hollywood with a wild riff on the Marilyn Monroe death myth in an astonishing, behind-the-headlines crime epic. “James Ellroy, the neo-noir eminence of L.A. crime fiction, is back, with his favorite snake, Fred Otash, in tow. . . . And he sure can shoulder a novel." —Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker Los Angeles, August 4, 1962. The city broils through a midsummer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash. The freewheeling Freddy O: tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is love.” Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe’s death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle. We are with him as he tears through all those who block his path to the truth. We are with him as he penetrates the faux-sunshine of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the shuck of Camelot. We are with him as he falters, and grasps for love beyond opportunity. We are with him as he tracks Marilyn Monroe’s horrific last charade through a nightmare L.A. that he served to create — and as he confronts his complicity and his own raging madness. It’s the Summer of ’62, baby. Freddy O’s got a hot date with history. The savage Sixties are ready to pop. It’s just a shot away. The Enchanters is a transcendent work of American popular fiction. It is James Ellroy at his most crazed, brilliant, provocative, profanely hilarious, and stop-your-heart tender. It is a luminous psychological drama and an unparalleled thrill ride. It is, resoundingly, the great American crime novel.

From the modern master of noir comes a novel based on the real-life Hollywood fixer Freddy Otash, the malevolent monarch of the 1950s L.A. underground, and his Tinseltown tabloid Confidential magazine. Freddy Otash was the man in the know and the man to know in ‘50s L.A. He was a rogue cop, a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp—and, most notably, the head strong-arm goon for Confidential magazine. Confidential presaged the idiot internet—and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink, and the scurrilous skank. It mauled misanthropic movie stars, sex-soiled socialites, and putzo politicians. Mattress Jack Kennedy, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson—Frantic Freddy outed them all. He was the Tattle Tyrant who held Hollywood hostage, and now he’s here to CONFESS. “I’m consumed with candor and wracked with recollection. I’m revitalized and resurgent. My meshugenah march down memory lane begins NOW.” In Freddy’s viciously entertaining voice, Widespread Panic torches 1950s Hollywood to the ground. It’s a blazing revelation of coruscating corruption, pervasive paranoia, and of sin and redemption with nothing in between. Here is James Ellroy in savage quintessence. Freddy Otash confesses—and you are here to read and succumb.

Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins can’t stand music, or any loud sounds. He’s got a beautiful wife, but he can’t get enough of other women. And instead of bedtime stories, he regales his daughters with bloody crime stories. He’s a thinking man’s cop with a dark past and an obsessive drive to hunt down monsters who prey on the innocent. Now, there’s something haunting him. He sees a connection in a series of increasingly gruesome murders of women committed over a period of twenty years. To solve the case, Hopkins will dump all the rules and risk his career to make the final link and get the killer.

A botched liquor store heist leaves three grisly dead. A hero cop is missing. Nobody could see a pattern in these two stray bits of information–no one except Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins, a brilliant and disturbed L.A. cop with an obsessive desire to protect the innocent. To him they lead to one horrifying conclusion--a killer is on the loose and preying on his city. From the master of L.A. noir comes this beautiful and brutal tale of a cop and a criminal squared off in a life and death struggle.

In James Ellroy''s riveting second novel, an ambitious beat cop is hot on the trail of a serial killer who frequents L.A. dive bars and preys on the fallen women he finds there. Los Angeles, 1951. For Officer Fred Underhill, the job is all about the wonder, an elusive quality he finds while dealing with the city’s drunks, hopheads, gunsels, and burglars. When he’s not reveling in the glory of cleaning up the streets, he’s on the green or scoring women. But Underhill’s ambition and allegiance to the badge get the better of him when a grim opportunity to prove his worth arises. Catching a serial strangler who is snuffing out women would all but ensure his place at the top. As he climbs his way up, the hungry rookie wheels and deals with some of the force’s most unscrupulous officers, and when the case goes sideways and fast, the eyes of the very law he serves will be trained on him. Now Underhill’s only chance to redeem himself is to pick up the trail of the soulless killer and close the case himself.

Set in Los Angeles from 1947 to 1959, Hollywood Nocturnes gives us an afterword and six stories set in the same crime-ridden, sex-crazed period of history of James Ellroy''s L.A. Quartet novels (which include L.A. Confidential and The Big Nowhere). Dig this: the swinging sax man''s doing repos and plotting a kidnapping-of himself; a tommy gun is ripping apart windows, curtains, and bodies in High Darktown; a carhop at Scrivner''s is keeping two extremely sweet sugar daddies, Howard Hughes and mobster Mickey Cohen, happy-until the scene turns murderous. This is the hip-hop hard-edged world of L.A. 1950s style: cars with fins, Commies in closets, starmakers with come-ons, ex-cons with guns, and cops with mean streaks as wide as Sunset Strip. James Ellroy''s bizarre, stark tales dazzle us with their unexpected humor, raw brutality, and slightly lighter-than-usual noir realism. Hollywood Nocturnes is quintessential Ellroy: bluesy, black, and very, very hot.

Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins is the most brilliant homicide detective in the Los Angeles Police Department and one of its most troubled. In his obsessive mission to protect the innocent, there is no line he won’t cross. Estranged from his wife and daughters and on the verge of being drummed out of the department for his transgressions, Hopkins is assigned to investigate a series of bloody bank robberies. As the violence escalates and the case becomes ever more vicious, Hopkins will be forced to cross the line once again to stop a maniac on a murder binge.

Beneath the slick, glittering surface of L.A., an underworld of depravity and wickedness reins. Fritz Brown is a part-time private eye and full-time repo-man who gets his kicks listening to classical music. But the waters get too deep for Brown when he takes a case from a cash-flashing golf caddy named Freddy “Fat Dog” Baker that puts him on the trail of his client’s sister and the older gentleman she’s run off with. But more suspicious than his sister, a classy cellist, is Fat Dog himself, who has a past more sordid than he lets on. Diving into a cesspool of payoffs, incest, and arson, Brown’s California dreaming transforms into a technicolor nightmare. In his hypnotic debut, master crime writer James Ellroy takes us to the edge of an abyss, where nothing, not even Beethoven, can let in the light.

January ''42. L.A. reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese residents are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops tag it a routine dead-man job. They''re wrong. It''s an early-warning signal of Chaos. There''s a murderous fire and a gold heist. There''s Fifth Column treason on American soil. There are homegrown Nazis, Commies, and race racketeers. It''s populism ascendant. There''s two dead cops in a dive off the jazz-club strip. And three men and one woman have a hot date with history. Elmer Jackson is a corrupt Vice cop. He''s a flesh peddler and a bagman for the L.A. Chief of Police. Hideo Ashida is a crime-lab whiz, lashed by anti-Japanese rage. Dudley Smith is PD hardnose working Army Intelligence. He''s gone rogue and gone all-the-way fascist. Joan Conville was born rogue. She''s a defrocked Navy lieutenant and a war profiteer to her core. L.A. ''42. Homefront madness. Wartime inferno--This Storm is James Ellroy''s most audacious novel yet. It is by turns savage, tender, elegiac. It lays bare and celebrates crazed Americans of all stripes. It is a masterpiece.

Here in one volume is James Ellroy''s first great body of work, an epic re-envisioning of postwar Los Angeles--etched in red and black and film-noir grays. The Black Dahlia depicts the secret infrastructure of L.A.''s most sensational murder case. A young cop morphs into obsessed lover and lust-crazed avenger. The Dahlia claims him. She is the deus ex machina of a boomtown in extremis. The cop''s rogue investigation is a one-way ticket to hell. The Big Nowhere blends the crime novel and the political novel. It is winter, 1950--and the L.A. County Grand Jury is out to slam movieland Reds. It''s a reverential shuck--and the three cops assigned to the job are out to grab all the glory they can. A series of brutal sex killings intervenes, and the job goes all-the-way bad. L.A. Confidential is the great novel of Los Angeles in the 1950s. Political corruption. Scandal-rag journalism. Bad racial juju and gangland wars. Six local stiffs slaughtered in an all-night hash house. The glorious and overreaching LAPD on an unprecedented scale. White Jazz gives us the tortured confession of a corrupt cop going down for the count. He''s a slumlord, a killer, a parasitic exploiter. He''s a pawn in a series of police power plays and starting to see that he''s being had. He''s just met a woman. Thus, he''s determined to claw his way out of the horrifying world he''s created--and he''s determined to tell us everything. The L.A. Quartet is a groundbreaking work of American popular fiction.

The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy concludes. We''ve traversed the interlocked conspiracies of the decade and are there for the wind-up and swan songs. Blood''s A Rover takes us into the seventies. MLK and RFK are dead. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago has spawned chaos. There''s a punk-kid private eye in L.A. He''s clashing with a mob goon and an enforcer for J. Edgar Hoover. There''s an armored-car heist and a cache of missing emeralds. There''s bad voodoo in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Amidst it all is a revolutionary, Joan Rosen Klein. The kid P.I., the mob goon, and Hoover''s enforcer love her unto death. Blood''s A Rover gives us the private nightmare of public policy on an epic scale.

LA has known its share of notorious murderers. Hickman, Glatman, Bashor, Sirhan, Manson, Turner, Bianchi and Buono, just to name an ugly few. These remain stories told once and again. Tragic cases that commanded varying degrees of attention. None upset the urban routine like the Night Stalker. His crimes activated insecurities previously foreign to Angelenos. Brutal and unthinkable killings moved millions to a state of near lockdown. Law enforcement''s simultaneous scramble aimed to calm the masses and catch a killer. The effect on the millions of innocents was patently unfair, but proved abundantly necessary. The social impact of the serial killings and serial crimes committed by Richard Ramirez is discussed by a number of contributors who bolted doors, locked windows and took up arms in the heat of just a single summer. It was 1985.It was Satan''s Summer in the City of Angels.

Deux enquêtes de James Ellroy sur deux faits divers marquants de l''après-guerre à Los Angeles et à New York, dans la plus pure tradition du "true crime" américain. L''un des textes revisite la mort de l''acteur Sal Mineo, le premier acteur hollywoodien à avoir fait son "coming out" sur son homosexualité, et l''autre revient sur l''affaire Wylie-Hoffert, le meurtre sauvage de deux jeunes femmes new-yorkaises dont un Noir, George Whitmore, a été accusé à tort. Du grand Ellroy, avec une écriture au scalpel qui parvient à créer l''empathie et l''émotion. Des textes quasiment inédits (seul celui sur Wylie Hoffert est paru dans le Vanity Fair américain).

A remarkable portrait of “true L.A. noir” with archival photos from the Los Angeles Police Museum and text by legendary crime writer James Ellroy (Los Angeles Times). James Ellroy, the undisputed master of crime writing, has teamed up with the Los Angeles Police Museum to present a stunning text on 1953 L.A. While combing the museum’s photo archives, Ellroy discovered that the year featured a wide array of stark and unusual imagery—and to accompany the pictures, he has written text to illuminate the crimes and law enforcement of the era. Ellroy offers context along with wild detail and rich atmosphere—this is the cauldron that was police work in the city of the tarnished angels seven decades ago, revealed in more than 80 duotone photos throughout the book. “These crime images resemble the work of photographer Weegee, but, Ellroy argues, they’re superior because they resist artistry; they were taken by police officers doing their jobs.” —Chicago Tribune

24 février 1964, 7h16 du matin à Los Angeles. Attaque d''un fourgon blindé de la Wells Fargo. Quatre convoyeurs abattus, trois braqueurs morts ; le quatrième a pris la fuite en emportant seize sacs de billets et quatorze mallettes remplies d''émeraudes. C''est sur ce braquage, disséqué avec une maestria éblouissante, que s''ouvre « Underworld USA », dernier volet de la trilogie commencée avec « American Tabloid ». Le narrateur reste dans l''ombre. Il nous prévient que le livre est fondé sur des documents publics détournés, des journaux intimes dérobés. En 131 chapitres et cinq parties au titre aussi évocateur que provocateur, ce roman noir et politique reconstruit les années les plus tourmentées de l''Amérique du XXe siècle, avec une largeur de vision et une profondeur stupéfiantes. « Underworld USA » est la flamboyante conclusion de la trilogie qui a placé James Ellroy au rang des plus grands écrivains américains d''aujourd''hui, selon le Los Angeles Times Book Review.

Dallas, novembre 63. Le coeur du rêve américain explose. Un jeune flic arrive de Las Vegas avec 6000 dollars en liquide et un sale boulot à exécuter. Il ne sait pas qu''il va faire partie du complot visant à étouffer la vérité sur l''assassinat de Kennedy. Il s''appelle Wayne Tedrow. Cinq années dans les coulisses de la politique vont le conduire de Dallas au Vietnam, en passant par le sud des Etats-Unis. Cinq années avec J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, la Mafia et le Ku Klux Klan. Voici le second volet de la trilogie Underworld USA, commencée avec American Tabloid (Rivages/Noir n° 282). Le cauchemar américain nourri des coïncidences de l''histoire des années 60 passées au crible par Ellroy. Il y a de la folie chez cet écrivain, de l''obsession dans son écriture.

Conversations with the author of such acclaimed works as American Tabloid, L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia

Three of Ellroy''s most compelling novels featuring Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins in one volume. Blood On The Moon: 20 random killings of women are unconnected in police files. But Det. Sgt. Lloyd Hopkins sees a pattern. As he is drawn to the murderer, the two men face a confrontation pitting icy intelligence against white-heated madness. . . Because The Night: Jacob Herzog, hero cop, has disappeared. A multiple murder committed with a pre-Civil War revolver remains unsolved. Are the two cases connected? As Det. Sgt. Lloyd Hopkins pieces the puzzle together he discovers the darker threat of John Haviland, a psychiatrist whose pleasure comes from the manipulation of the weak and lonely. Suicide Hill: Duane Rice leaves jail with good news and bad news: two adulterous bank managers are ripe for squeezing, but Vandy, who he is obsessed with making a rock star, has disappeared. An orgy of violence erupts as Duane''s partner goes beserk and Duane settles scores with knife and bullet. Leading the manhunt Sgt. Lloyd Hopkins stumbles on a horrifying conspiracy of corruption and betrayal- among his own colleagues. Ellroy''s three great early novels are available in one volume for the first time - the books that led up to his LA Quartet.

CHOSEN BY TIME MAGAZINE AS ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR "ONE HELLISHLY EXCITING RIDE." --Detroit Free Press The ''50s are finished. Zealous young senator Robert Kennedy has a red-hot jones to nail Jimmy Hoffa. JFK has his eyes on the Oval Office. J. Edgar Hoover is swooping down on the Red Menace. Howard Hughes is dodging subpoenas and digging up Kennedy dirt. And Castro is mopping up the bloody aftermath of his new communist nation. "HARD-BITTEN. . . INGENIOUS. . . ELLROY SEGUES INTO POLITICAL INTRIGUE WITHOUT MISSING A BEAT." --The New York Times In the thick of it: FBI men Kemper Boyd and Ward Littell. They work every side of the street, jerking the chains of made men, street scum, and celebrities alike, while Pete Bondurant, ex-rogue cop, freelance enforcer, troubleshooter, and troublemaker, has the conscience to louse it all up. "VASTLY ENTERTAINING." --Los Angeles Times Mob bosses, politicos, snitches, psychos, fall guys, and femmes fatale. They''re mixing up a molotov cocktail guaranteed to end the country''s innocence with a bang. Dig that crazy beat: it''s America''s heart racing out of control. . . . "A SUPREMELY CONTROLLED WORK OF ART." --The New York Times Book Review

A treasure trove of a hundred years'' worth of the finest noir writing selected by James Ellroy

The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. A rip-roaring, devilishly wild ride through the bloody end of the 1960''s. It''s dark baby, and hot hot hot. Martin Luther King assassinated. Robert Kennedy assassinated. Los Angeles, 1968. Conspiracies theories are taking hold. On the horizon looms the Democratic Convention in Chicago and constant gun fire peppers south L.A. Violence, greed, and grime, are replacing free-love and everybody from Howard Hughes, Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover to the right-wing assassins and left-wing revolutionaries are getting dirty. At the center of it all is a triumvirate: the president’s strong-arm goon, an ex-cop and heroine runner, and a private eye whose quarry is so dangerous she could set off the whole powder keg. With his trademark deadly staccato prose, James Ellroy holds nothing back in this wild, startling and much anticipated conclusion to his Underworld USA trilogy.

The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy presents another literary masterpiece, this time a true crime murder mystery about his own mother. In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself. In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten--and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.

Por el autor de los superventas L. A. Confidential y La Dalia Negra. A la deriva en el brumoso Hollywood de los cincuenta, Dick Contino, un acordeonista prácticamente acabado, trata de dar un empujón a su carrera perpetrando un secuestro perfecto: el suy

Ex-cop, private detective Spade Hearns is to investigate a massacre which occurred in unclear circumstances, and also especially to protect Maggie Cordova, the cabaret singer. The proximity of this woman, however, reopens old wounds and seems to shake the objectivity and the professionalism of the detective.

Dig. The Demon Dog gets down with a new book of scenes from America’s capital of kink: Los Angeles. Fourteen pieces, some fiction, some nonfiction, all true enough to be admissible as state’s evidence, and half of it in print for the first time. And every one of them bearing the James Ellroy brand of mayhem, machismo, and hollow-nose prose. Here are Mexican featherweights and unsolved-murder vics, crooked cops and a very clean D.A. Here is a profile of Hollywood’s latest celebrity perp-walker, Robert Blake, and three new novellas featuring a demented detective with an obsession with a Hollywood actress. And, oh yes, just maybe the last appearance of Hush-Hush sleaze-monger Danny Getchell. Here’s Ellroy himself, shining a 500-watt Mag light into all the dark places of his life and imagination. Destination: Morgue! puts the reader’s attention in a hammerlock and refuses to let go.

Illuminating all the dark places of Ellroy''s life and imagination, this second volume of previously uncollected works includes writings from the beginning of his career as a writer-at-large for GQ, memoir pieces from the ''60s and ''70s, and three new novellas told from the perspective of carved-in-wood LAPD detective Rick Jenson. The mastery of noir convention, snappy dialogue, and cunning social observation for which Ellroy is admired are in full force throughout this collection. Desde sus primeras escrituras hasta tres nuevas novelas, esta coleccio n es una nueva inmersio n, intensa y adictiva, en el universo de James Ellroy. Desde la a cida cri tica a la lucha por la presidencia de Estados Unidos, pasando por los rings donde dejan la vida y buscan la fama los boxeadores mexicanos, hasta llegar a los relatos intimistas y autobiogra ficos, James Ellroy plasma su percepcio n de un mundo desquiciado en el que no siempre es posible hallar La Verdad. Leer esta coleccio n es descubrir lo que significa indignarse, rebelarse, sentir soledad, ternura, o desesperacio n con un escritor que conmueve tanto con una historia totalmente ficticia como con el relato de su propia experiencia vital.

The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. 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.