James Ellroy

In 1958, when James Ellroy was 10 years old, his mother's body was found in a run-down town near Los Angeles. The murderer was never found; the case remains unsolved. This remarkable book--part unflinching autobiography, part vivid reportage--tells an extraordinarily gripping story about the failed murder investigation, uncovering Ellroy's daring, revelatory journey into and through his most forbidding memories. 14 photos.

A L.A. Crime Memoir

My Dark Places

In the LAPD of 1958, Lt. Dave Klein is hung out as bait to take the fall for police corruption.

White Jazz

LAPD investigators Bucky Bleichart and Lee Blanchard find themselves enthralled with the mysterious and brutal murder of a beautiful young woman, Elizabeth Short. Their obsession takes a dark turn as they delve into the underbelly of Hollywood and the heart of the dead woman’s tortured and twisted past. It is a case that will test their mettle and their sanity. This gripping graphic novel adaptation of the bestselling novel by James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia, delves deeply into one of the most haunting unsolved crimes in American history. Acclaimed storyteller Matz (The Killer) and award-winning filmmaker David Fincher (Gone Girl, Zodiac) worked at length to preserve much of Ellroy's original dialogue while bringing the stark images of 1940s LA to full, living color with illustrator Miles Hyman.

The Black Dahlia

Wayne Tedrow, Jr., a young Vegas policeman with $6,000 in cash, is drawn unwittingly into a conspiracy involving the cover-up of the truth about the assassination of John Kennedy.

The Cold Six Thousand

L.A. Confidential is epic "noir", a crime novel of astonishing detail and scope written by the bestselling author of The Black Dahlia. A horrific mass murder invades the lives of victims and victimizers on both sides of the law. And three lawmen are caught in a deadly spiral, a nightmare that tests loyalty and courage, and offers no mercy, grants no survivors. (124,000 words)

L.A. Confidential

White jazz

"From "one of the great American writers of our time" (Los Angeles Times Book Review)--a brilliant historical crime novel, a pulse-pounding, as-it-happens narrative that unfolds in Los Angeles and Mexico in the wake in Pearl Harbor. New Year's Eve 1941, war has been declared and the Japanese internment is in full swing. Los Angeles is gripped by war fever and racial hatred. Sergeant Dudley Smith of the Los Angeles Police Department is now Army Captain Smith and a budding war profiteer. He's shacked up with Claire De Haven in Baja, Mexico, and spends his time sniffing out fifth column elements and hunting down a missing Japanese Naval Attache. Hideo Ashida is cashing LAPD paychecks and working in the crime lab, but he knows he can't avoid internment forever. Newly arrived Navy Lieutenant Joan Conville winds up in jail accused of vehicular homicide, but Captain William H. Parker squashes the charges and puts her on Ashida's team. Elmer Jackson, who is assigned to the alien squad and to bodyguard Ashida, begins to develop an obsession with Kay Lake, the unconsummated object of Captain Parker's desire. Now, Conville and Ashida become obsessed with finding the identity of a body discovered in a mudslide. It's a murder victim linked to an unsolved gold heist from '31, and they want the gold. And things really heat up when two detectives are found murdered in a notorious dope fiend hang-out"--

A Novel

This Storm

A debut entry in a second L.A. Quartet by the award-winning author of L.A. Confidential follows a post-Pearl Harbor murder of a Japanese family that entangles a brilliant Japanese-American forensic chemist, an adventurous woman, a future police chief and an arch villain. 75,000 first printing.

Perfidia

Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian counter-measures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History.Dwight Holly is J. Edgar Hoover's pet strong-arm goon, implementing Hoover's racist designs and obsessed with a leftist shadow figure named Joan Rosen Klein. Wayne Tedrow - ex-cop and heroin runner - is building a mob gambling mecca in the Dominican Republic and quickly becoming radicalized. Don Crutchfield is a window-peeping kid private-eye within tantalizing reach of right-wing assassins, left-wing revolutionaries and the power-mongers of an incendiary era. Their lives collide in pursuit of the Red Goddess Joan - and each of them will pay "a dear and savage price to live History."

Blood's a Rover

Freddy Otash is the man in the know and the man to know in 50s L.A. Freddy is an ex-L.A. cop on the skids. He snuffed a cop killer in cold blood - and it got to him bad. So Chief William H. Parker canned him. Now he's a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp - and, most notably, the head strongarm goon for Confidential magazine. Confidential presaged the idiot internet - and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink and the scurrilous skank on the feckless foibles of misanthropic movie stars, sex-soiled socialites, and potzo politicians. Freaky Freddy outs them all.

Widespread Panic

Fred Underhill is a young cop on the rise in Los Angeles in the early 1950's -- a town blinded to its own grime by Hollywood glitter; a society nourished by newspaper lies that wants its heroes all-American and squeaky clean. A chance to lead on a possible serial killing is all it takes to fuel Underhill's reckless ambition - and it propels him into a dangerous alliance with certain mad and unstable elements of the law enforcement hierarchy. When the case implodes with disastrous consequences, it is Fred Underhill who takes the fall. His life is in ruins, his promising future suddenly a dream of the past. And his good and pure love for a crusading woman lawyer has been corrupted and may not survive. But even without the authority of a badge, Fred Underhill knows that his only hope for redemption lies in following the investigation to its grim conclusion. And the Hell to which he has been consigned for his sins is the perfect place to hunt for a killer who hungers but has no soul.

Clandestine

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 fille de vingt-deux ans : Betty Short, surnommée " Le Dahlia Noir " par un reporter, à cause de son penchant à se vêtir totalement en noir. Le meurtre est resté l'une des énigmes les plus célèbres des annales du crime en Amérique.

Le Dahlia Noir

A noir anthology presents short stories that reveal the dark underbelly of the City of Angels, as well as journalistic pieces examining true crimes

Reportage and Fiction from the Underside of L.A.

Crime Wave

Otto Penzler

Collects the best noir writing from 1910 to 2010, including works by James M. Cain, Joyce Carol Oates, Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, Evan Hunter, Mickey Spillane, Patricia Highsmith, and William Gay.

The Best American Noir of the Century

Le Grand Nulle Part commence la nuit du premier de l'an 1950 et met en scène trois destins parallèles de policiers. L'inspecteur adjoint Danny Upshaw enquête sur une série de meurtres sexuels avec mutilations. Le lieutenant de la criminelle, Mal Considine, accepte de servir l'ambition d'un aspirant procureur en participant à un dossier sur l'influence communiste à Hollywood. Buzz Meeks, homme de main, ex-flic des narcotiques et pourvoyeur de chair fraîche pour Howard Hughes, se joint à la lutte contre " la menace rouge " pour l'argent et le pouvoir. Sans le savoir, les trois hommes ont acheté un billet pour l'enfer.

Le grand nulle part

One of James Ellroy's finest becomes a film, starring Scarlett Johansson.

A hardcover compendium of three detective novels by the author of L.A. Confidential, the basis of the motion picture, includes Blood on the Moon, Because the Night, and Suicide Hill. 50,000 first printing.

L.A. Noir

Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins of the LAPD, fueled by a desire to protect innocence, confronts a murderer who is driven by the same forces when he investigates a series of murders of young women in the Los Angeles area. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Blood on the Moon

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.

Killer on the Road

A magisterial anthology of American noir writing in the 20th century by the best-selling author of the LA Quartet: The Black Dahlia. The Big Nowhere , LA Confidential and White Jazz. In his intoduction to The Best American Noir of the Century, James Ellroy writes, "noir is the most scrutinised offshoot of the hard-boiled school of fiction. It's the long drop off the short pier and the wrong man and the wrong woman in perfect misalliance. It's the nightmare of flawed souls with big dreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing that goes bad." Offering the best examples of literary sure things gone bad, this collection ensures that nowhere else can readers find a darker, more thorough distillation of American noir fiction. James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, series editor of the annual The Best American Mystery Stories, mined one hundred years of writing - 1910-2010 - to find this treasure trove of thirty-nine stories. From noir's twenties-era infancy come gems like James M. Cain's "Pastorale," and its post-war heyday boasts giants like Mickey Spillane and Evan Hunter. Packing an undeniable punch, diverse contemporary incarnations include Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, Patricia Highsmith and William Gay, with many page-turners appearing in the last decade.

James Ellroy

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