Mystery Monday: James Ellroy
--by Hanje Richards
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Because I am a huge mystery fan, "Mystery Monday" was born. Because I like to read mysteries in order, I'm going to list and talk about them in chronological, rather than alphabetical, order.
Because I am a huge mystery fan, "Mystery Monday" was born. Because I like to read mysteries in order, I'm going to list and talk about them in chronological, rather than alphabetical, order.
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For those interested in reading some of the featured titles, I've noted at the end of each book's summary whether it's available at the Copper Queen Library (CQL) or at another library in Cochise
County through Interlibrary Loan (ILL).
.For those interested in reading some of the featured titles, I've noted at the end of each book's summary whether it's available at the Copper Queen Library (CQL) or at another library in Cochise
County through Interlibrary Loan (ILL). James Ellroy (born March 4, 1948) is an American crime writer and essayist. He has become known for the so-called "telegraphic" prose style of his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences – best exemplified in The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz, American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's a Rover.
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After his parents' divorce, Ellroy and his mother 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.
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After his parents' divorce, Ellroy and his mother 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.
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Hallmarks of his work include dense plotting and a relentlessly pessimistic — albeit moral — worldview. His work has earned Ellroy the nickname the "Demon Dog of American crime fiction." Ellroy writes longhand on legal pads, rather than on a computer, and prepares elaborate outlines for his books, most of which are several hundred pages long. 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.
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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."
.This signature style is not the result of a conscious decision, but chance. This came about when he was asked by his editor to shorten his novel White Jazz from 900 pages to 350. Rather than removing any sub-plots, Ellroy achieved this by eliminating verbs, creating a unique style of prose. While each sentence on its own is simple, the cumulative effect is a dense, baroque style.
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Black D
ahlia (1987) - On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a Los Angeles vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia – and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history. Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and rivals in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia – driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl's twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches – into a region of total madness. (available at CQL)
Black D
ahlia (1987) - On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a Los Angeles vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia – and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history. Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and rivals in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia – driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl's twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches – into a region of total madness. (available at CQL).
Blood o
n the Moon (1984) - 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. (available at CQL)
n the Moon (1984) - 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. (available at CQL).
Big N
owhere (1988) - An ambitious, enthralling melodrama painted on a broad, dark canvas. The novel's first half interweaves two stories of lonely, driven lawmen investigating the crimes of social outcasts. In the county sheriff's office, Deputy Danny Upshaw finds that his probe of a series of homosexual murders is unleashing some frightening personal demons. Meanwhile, DA's investigator Mal Considine is assigned to infiltrate a cadre of Hollywood leftists, knowing that in the red-scare atmosphere, any hint of Communist conspiracy he uncovers will advance his career. Impressed by Upshaw's intensity, Considine decides to use him as a decoy to seduce a powerful woman nicknamed the "Red Queen," and the two cases and their implications of corruption, deceit, and past violence converge explosively. (available at CQL)
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owhere (1988) - An ambitious, enthralling melodrama painted on a broad, dark canvas. The novel's first half interweaves two stories of lonely, driven lawmen investigating the crimes of social outcasts. In the county sheriff's office, Deputy Danny Upshaw finds that his probe of a series of homosexual murders is unleashing some frightening personal demons. Meanwhile, DA's investigator Mal Considine is assigned to infiltrate a cadre of Hollywood leftists, knowing that in the red-scare atmosphere, any hint of Communist conspiracy he uncovers will advance his career. Impressed by Upshaw's intensity, Considine decides to use him as a decoy to seduce a powerful woman nicknamed the "Red Queen," and the two cases and their implications of corruption, deceit, and past violence converge explosively. (available at CQL).
L.A. Confidential (1990) - Film-noir crime fiction akin to Chinatown, Hollywood Babylon, Raymo
nd Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Jim Thompson. It's about three tortured souls in the 1950s L.A.P.D.: Ed Exley, the clean-cut cop who lives shivering in the shadow of his dad, a legendary cop in the same department; Jack Vincennes, a cop who advises a Police Squad-like TV show and busts movie stars for payoffs from sleazy Hush-Hush magazine; and Bud White, a detective haunted by the sight of his dad murdering his mom.
nd Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Jim Thompson. It's about three tortured souls in the 1950s L.A.P.D.: Ed Exley, the clean-cut cop who lives shivering in the shadow of his dad, a legendary cop in the same department; Jack Vincennes, a cop who advises a Police Squad-like TV show and busts movie stars for payoffs from sleazy Hush-Hush magazine; and Bud White, a detective haunted by the sight of his dad murdering his mom. .
The cops chase stolen gangland heroin through a landscape littered with not-always-innocent corpses while succumbing to sexy sirens who have been surgically resculpted to resemble movie stars; a vile developer – a riff on Walt Disney – schemes to make big bucks off Moochie Mouse; and the cops compete with the crooks to see who can be more corrupt and violent. (available at CQL)
The cops chase stolen gangland heroin through a landscape littered with not-always-innocent corpses while succumbing to sexy sirens who have been surgically resculpted to resemble movie stars; a vile developer – a riff on Walt Disney – schemes to make big bucks off Moochie Mouse; and the cops compete with the crooks to see who can be more corrupt and violent. (available at CQL)
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White Jazz (1992) - Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns – it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer – a power in his
own small corner of Hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire.
White Jazz (1992) - Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns – it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer – a power in his
own small corner of Hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire..
Klein's been hung out as bait, "a bad cop to draw the heat," and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, from racketeers and drug kingpins – all of them hell-bent on keeping their own secrets hidden. For Klein, "forty-two and going on dead," it's dues time.
Klein's been hung out as bait, "a bad cop to draw the heat," and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, from racketeers and drug kingpins – all of them hell-bent on keeping their own secrets hidden. For Klein, "forty-two and going on dead," it's dues time.
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Klein tells his own story – his voice clipped, sharp, often as brutal as the events he's describing – taking us with him on a journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, avarice, and perversion. It's a world he created, but now he'll do anything to get out of it alive. (available at CQL)
Klein tells his own story – his voice clipped, sharp, often as brutal as the events he's describing – taking us with him on a journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, avarice, and perversion. It's a world he created, but now he'll do anything to get out of it alive. (available at CQL)
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Hollyw
ood Nocturnes (1994) - Dig it: A famous musician-cum-draft dodger is plotting the perfect celebrity snatch – his own. An ex-con raging on revenge in High Darktown becomes a cop's worst nightmare. While chasing kidnappers, two cops stumble on an Okie town as bloody as the O.K. Corral. A strongarm for Howard Hughes and mobster Mickey Cohen finds himself playing both ends against the middle, all for a murderously magnificent moll. This is L.A., Ellroy style – corrupt cops, goons with guns, rattling roadsters – and all in the staccato rhythm of the streets. Hollywood Nocturnes shows us the seedy side of glamorous Hollywood, laid out like a corpse in the morgue. (available through ILL)
Hollyw
ood Nocturnes (1994) - Dig it: A famous musician-cum-draft dodger is plotting the perfect celebrity snatch – his own. An ex-con raging on revenge in High Darktown becomes a cop's worst nightmare. While chasing kidnappers, two cops stumble on an Okie town as bloody as the O.K. Corral. A strongarm for Howard Hughes and mobster Mickey Cohen finds himself playing both ends against the middle, all for a murderously magnificent moll. This is L.A., Ellroy style – corrupt cops, goons with guns, rattling roadsters – and all in the staccato rhythm of the streets. Hollywood Nocturnes shows us the seedy side of glamorous Hollywood, laid out like a corpse in the morgue. (available through ILL).
Brown’s R
equiem (1994) - Fritz Brown's L.A. – and his life – are masses of contradictions, like stirring chorales sung for the dead. A less-than-spotless former cop with a drinking problem, a private eye-cum-repo man with a taste for great music, he has been known to wallow in the grime beneath the Hollywood glitter. But Fritz Brown's life is about to change, thanks to the appearance of a racist psycho who flashes too much cash for a golf caddie and who walked away clean from a multiple murder rap. Reopening this case could be Fritz's redemption; his welcome back to a moral world and his path to a pure and perfect love. But to get there, he must make it through a grim, lightless place where evil has no national borders; where lies beget lies and death begets death; where there's little tolerance for Bach or Beethoven and deadly arson is a lesser mortal sin; and where a P.I.'s unhealthy interest in the past can turn beautiful music into funeral dirge. (available through ILL)
Brown’s R
equiem (1994) - Fritz Brown's L.A. – and his life – are masses of contradictions, like stirring chorales sung for the dead. A less-than-spotless former cop with a drinking problem, a private eye-cum-repo man with a taste for great music, he has been known to wallow in the grime beneath the Hollywood glitter. But Fritz Brown's life is about to change, thanks to the appearance of a racist psycho who flashes too much cash for a golf caddie and who walked away clean from a multiple murder rap. Reopening this case could be Fritz's redemption; his welcome back to a moral world and his path to a pure and perfect love. But to get there, he must make it through a grim, lightless place where evil has no national borders; where lies beget lies and death begets death; where there's little tolerance for Bach or Beethoven and deadly arson is a lesser mortal sin; and where a P.I.'s unhealthy interest in the past can turn beautiful music into funeral dirge. (available through ILL).
American Ta
bloid (1995) - We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination – in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C. . . . Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy . . . Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty . . . Where three renegade law-enforcement officers – a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents – are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history. . . (available at CQL)
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American Ta
bloid (1995) - We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination – in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C. . . . Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy . . . Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty . . . Where three renegade law-enforcement officers – a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents – are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history. . . (available at CQL) .
My Dark Places: An L.A. Crime Memoir (1996) - 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 polic
e 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. This is his story.
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e 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. This is his story. .
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 an epic tale of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence. (available at CQL)
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The Cold Six-Th
ousand (2001) - 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.
The Cold Six-Th
ousand (2001) - 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. (available at CQL)
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. (available at CQL)
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Blood’s
A Rover (2009) - Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated. Robert Kennedy assassinated. Los Angeles, 1968. Conspiracy 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 heroin runner, and a private eye whose quarry is so dangerous she could set off the whole powder keg. (available at CQL)
Blood’s
A Rover (2009) - Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated. Robert Kennedy assassinated. Los Angeles, 1968. Conspiracy 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 heroin runner, and a private eye whose quarry is so dangerous she could set off the whole powder keg. (available at CQL)
posted by msbw @ 3:03 PM
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