| James Ellroy | |
|---|---|
| James_Ellroy.jpg}} | Image:James Ellroy.jpg |
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| Born | March 4 1948 Los Angeles, California |
| Occupation | novelist |
| Nationality | U.S. |
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 been called the "Demon Dog of American crime fiction."[1]
Contents |
Biography
In 1958, his mother, Geneva, 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 Ellroy's friend, Frank C. Girardot, a reporter for The San Gabriel Valley Tribune, accessed files on the murder from the detectives with Los Angeles Police 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. "[2] 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."[3] 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 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. In July 2006 Ellroy wrote an autobiographical essay for the Sunday magazine of the Los Angeles Times in which he detailed his relationship with the city he had returned to (again) in early June 2006, and divulged that he is recently divorced (again).[4] 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 "flabbergasted" 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.
Style and Themes
Ellroy is noted for a stripped-down hardboiled style, especially in his later books which rely on simple, staccato sentences in Dick and Jane style. For example: "Dawn came up. Wayne got in bed dressed. Lynette Stirred. Wayne played possum." [5] Many of Ellroy's books, such as The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid, and The Cold Six Thousand, have three disparate POV characters, with chapters alternating between them. Starting with The Black Dahlia, Ellroy's novels have been historical novels about the relationship of corruption and law enforcement.
Quotes
- "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."[6]
- "These old blue haired grannies come up to me and say `Oh, you wrote L.A. Confidential, what a wonderful movie that was'. Kim Basinger' was so beautiful in that film, is she nice in real life?' I say, 'Yeah, she's all right', and then granny says, `Is Kevin Spacey really gay?'"[7]
Bibliography
- 1981 Brown's Requiem
- 1982 Clandestine
- 1986 Killer on the Road (originally published as Silent Terror)
Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy
- 1984 Blood on the Moon
- 1984 Because the Night
- 1985 Suicide Hill
- 1998 L.A. Noir (omnibus edition)
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
- 2008 Blood's a Rover
Short Stories and Essays
- 1994 Hollywood Nocturnes (UK title: Dick Contino's Blues and Other Stories)
- 1999 Crime Wave
- 2004 Destination: Morgue!
Autobiography
- 1996 My Dark Places
Guest editor
- 2002 The Best American Mystery Stories 2002
Documentaries
- 1993 James Ellroy: Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction
- 2001 James Ellroy's Feast of Death
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
- 2008 Land of the Living
- 2009 White Jazz
References
- ^ James Ellroy: Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction documentary film
- ^ "My Mother and the Dahlia" by James Ellroy. The Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 2006). Retrieved on 2007-05-07.
- ^ "James Ellroy (1948 - )" by William Marling. Hard-Boiled Fiction (Case Western Reserve University, updated 2 August 2001). Retrieved on 2007-05-07.
- ^ "The Great Right Place: James Ellroy Comes Home" by James Ellroy. Los Angeles Times (July 30, 2006). Retrieved on 2007-05-07.
- ^ James Ellroy, The Cold Six Thousand, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2001. Pg. 150.
- ^ "The Mother Load: Questions for James Ellroy" Interview by Deborah Solomon. The New York Times Magazine (5 November 2006). Retrieved on 2007-05-07.
- ^ "Author Defends Spacey's Privacy". WENN (World Entertainment News Network) (11 May 2001). Retrieved on 2007-05-07.
See also
External links
- James Ellroy at the Internet Movie Database
- 1987, 1992 interviews with James Ellroy by Don Swaim at Wired for Books.
- James Ellroy interviewed by Robert Birnbaum at identitytheory.com
- CNN interview with James Ellroy
- FilmThreat interview by Tony DuShane
- James Ellroy at the Internet Book List
- Ellroy on Dashiell Hammett
