New Releases by James Ellroy

Le 15 janvier 1947, dans un terrain vague de Los Angeles, est découvert le corps nu et mutilé, sectionné en deux au niveau de la taille, d''une jeune femme de vingt-deux ans : Betty Short, surnommée " Le Dahlia noir " par un reporter, à cause de son penchant à se vêtir totalement de noir. Le meurtre est resté l''une des énigmes les plus célèbres des annales du crime en Amérique.

Martin Michael Plunkett is a product of his times -- the possessor of a genius intellect, a pitiless soul of brushed steel, and a heart of blackest evil. With criminal tendencies forged in the fires of L.A.''s Charles Manson hysteria, he comes to the bay city of San Francisco -- and submits to savage and terrible impulses that reveal to him his true vocation as a pure and perfect murderer. And so begins his decade of discovery and terror, as he cuts a bloody swath across the full length of a land, ingeniously exploiting and feeding upon a society''s obsessions. As he maneuvers deftly through a seamy world of drugs, flesh, and perversions, the media will call him many things -- but Martin Plunkett''s real name is Death. His brilliant, twisted mind is a horriying place to explore. His madness reflects a nation''s own. The killer is on the road. And there''s nowhere in America to hide.

Los Angeles. In no other city do sex, celebrity, money, and crime exert such an irresistible magnetic field. And no writer has mapped that field with greater savagery and savvy than James Ellroy. With this fever-hot collection of reportage and short fiction, he returns to his native habitat and portrays it as a smog-shrouded netherworld where"every third person is a peeper, prowler, pederast, or pimp." From the scandal sheets of the 1950s to this morning''s police blotter, Ellroy reopens true crimes and restores human dimensions to their victims. Sublimely, he resurrects the rag Hush-Hush magazine. And in a baroquely plotted novella of slaughter and corruption he enlists the forgotten luminaries of a lost Hollywood. Shocking, mesmerizing, and written in prose as wounding as an ice pick, Crime Wave is Ellroy at his best.

La véritable Trinité de Camelot était : de la Gueule, de la Poigne et de la Fesse. Jack Kennedy a été l''homme de paille mythologique d''une tranche de notre histoire particulièrement juteuse. Il avait du bagou, il dégoisait des conneries et arborait une coupe de cheveux de classe internationale. Jack s''est fait dessouder au moment optimal pour lui assurer la sainteté. Les mensonges continuent à tourbillonner autour de sa flamme éternelle. L''heure est venue de déloger son urne funéraire de son piédestal et de jeter la lumière sur quelques hommes qui ont accompagné son ascension et facilité sa chute. Il y avait parmi eux des flics pourris, des artistes de l''extorsion et du chantage, des rois du mouchard téléphonique et des soldats de fortune. L''heure est venue de démythifier toute une époque. Thriller explosif, dont les protagonistes sont John et Robert Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes et Fidel Castro, American Tabloid est le premier volet de la trilogie Underworld USA, qui se poursuit avec American Death Trip.

''No emotion is spared; the writing is sparse, the plotting controlled. Not for the faint of heart, this is a big, powerful crime novel and possibly the first important example of the genre in the 1990s'' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH Christmas 1951, Los Angeles: a city where the police are as corrupt as the criminals. Six prisioners 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. . . . ''Empty of any unessentials and full of wise-cracking wit'' MAIL ON SUNDAY ''Ellroy writes as if driven by demons. His brutal, staccato graffiti tips over the into art'' SUNDAY TIMES

A novella and five previously unpublished short stories set in the 1940s and 1950s in Los Angeles. In Dick Contino''s Blues, a honky tonk accordion player arranges to have a starlet and himself kidnapped in the hope of boosting his career.

In this crime novel, there is a man on the loose in America. A man who kills for the sheer pleasure of spilling blood. A man who rearranges the mutilated bodies of his victims in positions that, to him, have the purity of art. The author also wrote The Big Nowhere and Suicide Hill.