James Ellroy

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James Ellroy is arguably America's greatest -- and certainly its most prolific -- crime writer.

His staccato, film noir-inspired novels are brutal dissections of the American dream, borrowing at will from postwar U.S. history, conspiracy theory and trash culture to create a world that is heartless, amoral and blood-soaked.

His most famous diptych -- American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand -- are a breathless, claustrophobic rattle though a decade of history pivoting on the Kennedy assassination, in which the FBI and the CIA are as bent as the mafia and the Klan and flawed historical characters such as the Kennedys, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes and Martin Luther King come alive on the page.

Ellroy's bleak worldview was influenced by the unsolved murder of his mother in 1958. Obsessed with crime and crime writing, Ellroy drifted into a lifestyle of petty criminality, indulging in shoplifting, break-ins, drug-taking and heavy drinking.

Finally diverting his energies into writing about crime rather than pursuing it, Ellroy's first novel Brown's Requiem -- a tale of arson, incest and golf caddies -- was published in 1981.

In 1987 Ellroy published The Black Dahlia, the tale of a young woman's murder in 1947 which blurred the lines between the famous unsolved case and his mother's own death.

The film version of the story, set to be released in 2006, follows the Oscar-winning adaptation of Ellroy's LA Confidential in 1997.

"It's lucky I can write," says Ellroy, "because I am too lazy to work, too nervous to steal and too proud to accept welfare."

Bibliography

1981: Brown's Requiem
1982: Clandestine
1984: Blood on the Moon
1984: Because the Night
1985: Suicide Hill
1986: Killer on the Road
1987: The Black Dahlia
1988: The Big Nowhere
1990: L.A. Confidential
1992: White Jazz
1994: Hollywood Nocturnes
1995: American Tabloid
1996: My Dark Places
1999: Crime Wave
2001: The Cold Six Thousand
2004: Destination: Morgue!

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