James Ellroy
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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 sometimes been called the "Demon Dog of American crime fiction".
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.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."[link]
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 is a strict vegetarian, he opposes the death penalty, and favors gun control.
Ellroy lives in Carmel, California, with his wife, Helen Knode, who authored the 2003 novel The Ticket Out. He is currently working on Police Gazette, the final (and reportedly largest) volume of his Underworld USA trilogy of novels, which began with American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. It is due for relase in late 2007.
Films
- 1987 Cop (movie)
- 1995 Shotgun Freeway
- 1997 L.A. Confidential
- 1998 Brown's Requiem
- 2001 James Ellroy's Feast of Death
- 2002 Stay Clean
- 2002 Dark Blue
- 2006 The Black Dahlia
- 2006 The Man Who Kept Secrets
- 2006 The Night Watchman
Bibliography
Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy
- 1984 Blood on the Moon
- 1984 Because the Night
- 1985 Suicide Hill
L.A. Quartet
Short Stories and Essays
- 1994 Hollywood Nocturnes (AKA, Dick Contino's Blues)
- 1999 Crime Wave
- 2004
Autobiography
External links
- [Ellroy.com]
- [Ellroy Confidential]
- [IMDB - James Ellroy]
- [James Ellroy's World]
- [1987 Audio Interview] by Don Swaim
- [James Ellroy:Breakneck Pace] In particular, refers to a 2000 MSNBC interview in which he changed his mind publicly about the death penalty.
- [James Ellroy interviewed by Robert Birnbaum at identitytheory.com]
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