James Ellroy - Author

Perfidia

There has never been a writer like James Ellroy. (Telegraph). Los Angeles, December 6, 1941. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. War fever and race hate grip the city and the internment of Japanese Americans begins. When a Japanese family is found brutally murdered, three men and one woman are summoned. William H Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police force. He's superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith - Irish emigre, ex-IRA killer and fledgling war profiteer. Kay Lake is a 21-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. Hideo Ashida is a brilliant police chemist and the only Japanese on the payroll. Four driven souls - rivals, lovers, history's pawns - thrown into an investigation which will not only rip them apart but take America to the edge of the abyss at a crucial moment in its history.

Perfidia

It is December 6 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor.     Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal Japanese-Americans - but now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins. The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. William H. Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police. He's superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith - Irish emigre, ex-IRA killer, fledgling war profiteer. Kay Lake is a 21-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. The investigation throws them together and rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm centre that brilliantly illuminates these four driven souls - comrades, rivals, lovers, history's pawns. Perfidia is a novel of astonishments. It is World War II as you have never seen it, and Los Angeles as James Ellroy has never written it before. Here, he gives us the party at the edge of the abyss and the precipice of America's ascendance. Perfidia is that moment, spellbindingly captured. It beckons us to solve a great crime that, in its turn, explicates the crime of war itself. It is a great American novel.

The Black Dahlia

Los Angeles, 15th January 1947: a beautiful young woman walked into the night and met her horrific destiny. Five days later, her tortured body was found drained of blood and cut in half. The newspapers called her 'The Black Dahlia'. Two cops are caught up in the investigation and embark on a hellish journey that takes them to the core of the dead girl's twisted life...

Destination: Morgue

Hollywood Fuckpad, Hot Prowl Rape-O and Jungletown Jihad are vintage Ellroy: starting in 1983 and ending in the present day, they are interlinked novellas telling the story of a bad cop, Rick Jenson, and his twenty-year obsession with Donna Donahue, a beautiful Hollywood actress. The only way Rick can get close to Donna is by bringing her into investigations of the teeming Tinseltown underworld: psychopathic killers, stalkers and terrorists commingle in an unholy cocktail of sex, sleaze and violence. Jenson and Donahue cut a swathe through the cases, treading a high wire of danger and a fatal sexual attraction. The book also contains eight previously unpublished non-fiction articles ranging from cases from the Los Angeles Police Unsolved Homicide files to the first article Ellroy has ever written on his imaginative process: Where I Get My Weird Shit. This is James Ellroy's second collection of short pieces following on from Dick Contino's Blues. 'James Ellroy is a genius: the finest American crime writer since Raymond Chandler, and one of the most readable experimental writers in the world' TLS 'All Ellroy's preoccupations are present: corruption, sex, violence, unsolved murders and excess by the dozen. As ever the results are as fascinating as a car crash' Guardian 'One of the finest US writers. Admirers will be pleased to learn that Ellroy's Mad Dog voice barks as loudly as ever, continuing to create it's own howling, breathtaking brand of powerful, pumped-up poetry' City Life

American Tabloid

We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFKs presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassinationin 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 mans loyalty...Where three renegade law-enforcement officersa former L.A. cop and two FBI agentsare shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history....James Ellroys trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything hes written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open.

L.A. Confidential

Christmas 1951, Los Angeles: a city where the police are as corrupt as the criminals. Six prisoners are beaten senseless in their cells by cops crazed on alcohol. For the three L. A. P. D. detectives involved, it will expose the guilty secrets on which they have built their corrupt and violent careers.

LAPD '53

James Ellroy, the undisputed master of crime writing, has teamed up with the Los Angeles Police Museum to present a stunning text on 1953 LA. While combing the museum's photo archives, Ellroy discovered that the year featured a wide array of stark and unusual imagery-and he has written 25,000 words that illuminate the crimes and law enforcement of the era. Ellroy offers context and layers on wild and rich atmosphere-this is the cauldron that was police work in the city of the tarnished angels more than six decades ago. More than 80 duotone photos are spread throughout the book in the manner of hard-edged police evidence.

Perfidia

There has never been a writer like James Ellroy. (Telegraph). Los Angeles, December 6, 1941. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. War fever and race hate grip the city and the internment of Japanese Americans begins. When a Japanese family is found brutally murdered, three men and one woman are summoned. William H Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police force. He's superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith - Irish emigre, ex-IRA killer and fledgling war profiteer. Kay Lake is a 21-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. Hideo Ashida is a brilliant police chemist and the only Japanese on the payroll. Four driven souls - rivals, lovers, history's pawns - thrown into an investigation which will not only rip them apart but take America to the edge of the abyss at a crucial moment in its history.

Black Dahlia - Die schwarze Dahlie

"e;Ellroy ist der wichtigste zeitgenossische Krimiautor."e; Der SpiegelLos Angeles 1947: Auf einem verlassenen Grundstuck wird die Leiche einer jungen Frau entdeckt - nackt und bestialisch zugerichtet. Der Mord der Schwarzen Dahlie macht Schlagzeilen und lost die grote Verbrecherjagd in der Geschichte Kaliforniens aus. Fur Bucky Bleichert und Lee Blanchard vom Los Angeles Police Department wird die Suche nach dem Morder zur Obsession. Band 1 des beruhmten L.A.-Quartetts.Lesen Sie auch Die Rothaarige. Die Suche nach dem Morder meiner Mutter - James Ellroys wichtigsten autobiographischen Text; ein Klassiker der Kriminalliteratur.

Blutschatten

"e;Ellroy ist der wichtigste zeitgenossische Krimiautor."e; Der SpiegelLos Angeles 1950: In der Metropole wird Jagd auf Kommunisten und ihre Sympathisanten gemacht. Gleichzeitig zieht ein offenbar irrsinniger Morder die Stadt in seinen Bann. Drei Manner nehmen die Verfolgung auf: Danny Upshaw und Malcolm Considine vom LAPD und Turner Meeks, den die Polizei wegen Korruption gefeuert hat. Eine Hetzjagd beginnt.Band 2 des beruhmten L.A.-Quartetts.Lesen Sie auch Die Rothaarige. Die Suche nach dem Morder meiner Mutter - James Ellroys wichtigsten autobiographischen Text; ein Klassiker der Kriminalliteratur.

L.A. Confidential

"e;Ellroy ist der wichtigste zeitgenossische Krimiautor."e; Der SpiegelLos Angeles 1951: Am Weihnachtsabend uberfallen Unbekannte das Nachtcafe "e;The Nite Owl"e; und ermorden wie im Rausch die Gaste. Ed Exley, Jack Vincennes und Bud White vom LAPD sollen den Fall gemeinsam klaren. Doch jeder von ihnen hat eine eigene Rechnung zu begleichen.Band 3 des beruhmten L.A.-Quartetts.Lesen Sie auch Die Rothaarige. Die Suche nach dem Morder meiner Mutter - James Ellroys wichtigsten autobiographischen Text; ein Klassiker der Kriminalliteratur.

White Jazz

"e;Ellroy ist der wichtigste zeitgenossische Krimiautor."e; Der SpiegelLos Angeles 1958: Dave Klein, Lieutenant des LAPD, ist Cop und Gangster, Ermittler und Killer zugleich. In dem Sumpf aus Gewalt, Korruption und Drogen versteht er es meister-haft, seinen Kopf uber Wasser zu halten. Bis das FBI im mafiosen Milieu der Berufsboxer ermittelt und er zwischen die Fronten gerat.Band 4 des beruhmten L.A.-Quartetts.Lesen Sie auch Die Rothaarige. Die Suche nach dem Morder meiner Mutter - James Ellroys wichtigsten autobiographischen Text; ein Klassiker der Kriminalliteratur.

Ein amerikanischer Thriller

Macht, Milliarden und Mord im Amerika der Kennedys. James Ellroy erzahlt von der Kehrseite des Mythos jener Jahre. Es ist auch die Geschichte eines vielfachen Verrats und einer Mannerfreundschaft zwischen zwei ungleichen FBI-Agenten, deren erbittertster Widersacher im Sold des Multimillionars Howard Hughes steht.

Ein amerikanischer Albtraum

Dallas, 22. November 1963: John F. Kennedy ist ermordet und die Hintergrunde des Attentats auf den Prasidenten werden vertuscht. Ein junger Polizist kommt in Dallas an, mit einem Uberstellungsmandat und 6000 Dollar. Eine hollische Reise durch die wildesten Jahre der amerikanischen Geschichte beginnt - eine atemlose Irrfahrt durch explodierende amerikanische Traume.

Blut will flieen

Bose Ex-Cops, intrigante Killer, feige FBI-Informanten und gefahrliche Frauen - im Spiel um Macht, Millionen und Sex sind sie alle willfahrige Marionetten, gelenkt von Politikern und ihren zweifelhaften Freunden. James Ellroys Abschluss der Underworld-Trilogie ist ein gnadenlos spannender Thriller und ein literarisches Ereignis. USA, 1968: Nixon und Humphrey kandidieren fr das Prsidentenamt. Der Wahlkampf ist hart und geprgt von Verleumdung und Korruption. Die Ermordung von Martin Luther King und Robert Kennedy, die Proteste von Schwarzen und Studenten wie auch der Vietnamkrieg bringen Unruhe in das Amerika jener Tage. In Los Angeles beschftigt Scotty Bennett vom LAPD der ungeklrte brutale berfall auf einen Geldtransporter, bei dem mehrere Millionen Dollar und eine grere Menge Smaragde verschwanden. Je mehr er bei den Ermittlungen in die Nhe der Machtzentren gert, desto gefhrdeter ist seine Mission - und auch sein Leben. Steckte das FBI hinter dem berfall? Flossen die Millionen in Nixons Wahlkampf? Was hat Howard Hughes Nixon versprochen? James Ellroy fhrt zu den Hintertreppen der Macht und besticht mit seiner radikalen Gesellschaftskritik, einer explosiven Mischung aus Verschwrung und Gewalt, Besessenheit, Sex und Drogen.

Perfidia

"e;Besessenheit steht mir gut. Die Liebe zur Sprache definiert mich. Diesbezuglich fordere ich andauernd mein Geburtsrecht ein. Ich bin ein in Los Angeles geborener Amerikaner. Die Geschichte hat mich einmal mehr an meinen Schreibtisch gerufen. Mein Roman heit "e;Perfidia"e;. Der Titel bedeutet auf Spanisch "e;Verrat"e; und verweist auf ein klagendes Lied der spaten Dreiigerjahre. Der Roman ist 960 Seiten lang und in jeder Hinsicht gro angelegt. Die Geschichte erstreckt sich vom 6 . bis zum 29. Dezember 1941. Manner und Frauen mit groen Seelen geraten in Los Angeles im Monat von Pearl Harbor aneinander. Sie hab en groe Uberzeugungen, groe Traume und ein tief gestortes Pflichtbewusstsein. Sie arbeiten mit- und gegeneinander, um ein groes Verbrechen aufzuklaren , und streben gro und ruchlos nach Liebe. "e;Perfidia"e; ist die Quintessenz dessen, was ich uber die Kunst und das Handwerk des Geschichtenerzahlens, was ich uber Geschichte, uber Manner und Frauen wei, und uber die immer wieder drangende Frage, warum Menschen tun , was sie tun. Ich bin in die Vergangenheit hinabgestiegen und mit einem Geschenk fur Sie zuruckgekehrt . Das ich mit meinen allerbesten Wunschen anzunehmen bitte. James Ellroy"e;6. Dezember 1941: Es ist der Vorabend des Angriffs der Japaner auf Pearl Harbor. Amerika steht kurz vor dem Kriegseintritt. In Los Angeles wird eine japanische Familie tot aufgefunden. Handelt es sich um Mord oder rituellen Selbstmord? Die Ermittlungen bringen vier Menschen zusammen: Einen brillanten Forensiker, japanisch-amerikanischer Abstammung, eine junge Frau, von einer unbndigen Abenteuerlust getrieben, einen Polizisten, den es wirklich gab: William H. "e;Whiskey Bill"e; Parker, spter Chef des LAPD, und einen, der ein Produkt von Ellroys unnachahmlicher Phantasie ist: Dudley Smith, die perfide Verkrperung des Bsen. Seit vielen Jahren gilt James Ellroy als eine der wichtigsten Stimmen seines Landes, und entsprechend ist Perfidia in Amerika ein literarisches Ereignis.

Perfidia

NATIONAL BESTSELLER AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEARIt is December 6, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal Japanese-Americansbut now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins. The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. William H. Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police Department. He's superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up, and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley SmithIrish emigre, ex-IRA killer, fledgling war profiteer. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. Kay Lake is a twenty-one-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. The investigation throws them together and rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm center that brilliantly illuminates these four driven soulscomrades, rivals, lovers, history's pawns. Perfidia is a novel of astonishments. It is World War II as you have never seen it, and Los Angeles as James Ellroy has never written it before. Here, he gives us the party at the edge of the abyss and the precipice of America's ascendance. Perfidia is that moment, spellbindingly captured. It beckons us to solve a great crime that, in its turn, explicates the crime of war itself. It is a great American novel.From the Hardcover edition.

L.A. Confidential

L.A. Confidential is epic "e;noir"e;, 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)

Big Nowhere

"e;ELLROY IS THE AUTHOR OF SOME OF THE MOST POWERFUL CRIME NOVELS EVER WRITTEN"e;- NEW YORK TIMES Danny Upshaw is a Sheriff's deputy stuck with a bunch of snuffs nobody cares about; they're his chance to make his name as a cop...and to sate his darkest curiosities. Mal Considine is D.A.'s Bureau brass. He's climbing on the Red Scare bandwagon to advance his career and to gain custody of his adopted son, a child he saved from the horror of postwar Europe.Buzz Meeks -- bagman, ex-Narco goon, and pimp for Howard Hughes -- is fighting communism for the money. All three men have purchased tickets to a nightmare.

Clandestine

Los Angeles 1951 - Frederick Underhill, an ambitious rookie of the Los Angeles Police Department, want to become the most celebrated detective of his time. He is also sexually promiscuous. His two drives are brought together by the slaying of Maggie Cadwallader, a lonely woman whom Underhill slept with shortly before her death. Using his inside knowledge, Underhill gets himself on the case, which is being handled by LA's most fearsome investigator: Lieutenant Dudley Smith. But instead of the celebrity status he was hoping for, Underhill finds himself on the edge of the abyss, his whole life and future about to take a fall.

Brown's Requiem

Los Angeles - Fritz Brown, ex-alcoholic private eye with a stained past, makes do with car repossessions and classical music. Then he is offered a case by Freddy 'Fat Dog' Baker, an eccentric golf caddy whose sister has made off with a much older man. This is the beginning of the nightmare: the underworld of golf caddies, arson and incest played against the backdrop of an LA surreal by night and bad by day; of long-hidden secrets that will drive Brown back to the bottle and to the gun: all conspire to make this one of the most hypnotic crime novels ever written.

Clandestine

A murder investigation nearly drives a beat cop to madnessDespite the sunshine, high necklines, and demure purity of its silver-screen goddesses, Los Angeles in the 1950s is not a gentle place. Even as a young cop, Freddy Underhill knows this. Patrolling one of L.A.'s roughest districts, he sees the lust, rage, and madness that permeate the cityand stands in wonder and dismay at it all. He covers the beat with his partner Wacky Walker, a World War II veteran with a Medal of Honor, a drinking problem, and a serious obsession with death. When an old flame of Freddy's is murdered, the investigation takes them deep into the shadiest part of the city, where Freddy will have to embrace the darkness if he wants to emerge with his life.

Brown's Requiem

In James Ellroy's first novel, a PI investigates a deadly conspiracy at one of Los Angeles's most exclusive country clubsIt would be a stretch to call Fritz Brown a detective. A PI in name only, he washed out of the police force at twenty-five, and makes a cash living doing under-the-table repo work for a sleazy used-car dealer. It's an ugly job, but Fritz is not one to say no to easy money.That doesn't mean he won't take a case now and then. A caddy visits his office, asking Fritz to dig up dirt on the golf-nut who's dating his sister. Convinced by the caddy's suspiciously fat wad of bills, Fritz agrees to investigate, hoping for a chance to meet the girl. Instead he finds himself embroiled in a tangled world of country club intrigue, where wealth can buy innocence and murder is not half as rare as a hole-in-one.

Blood on the Moon

In the first Lloyd Hopkins novel, an L.A. homicide detective chases a cunning serial killerLloyd Hopkins was not yet a cop when the Watts riots ripped Los Angeles apart. A member of the California National Guard, he had dreams of trading in his khaki uniform for blueof serving and protecting instead of learning to kill. Called in to patrol the streets of South Central Los Angeles during the riots, he discovered that safeguarding his city often meant shedding blood.Seventeen years later, Hopkins wears plainclothes. He has everything he had dreamed of as a young soldier: a wife, a family, and a detective's commission. But the city's finest homicide detective is about to be tested. Twenty women are dead, and to find their killer this good cop must learn to think like the madman.

Suicide Hill

Forced off the L.A. murder squad, Detective Hopkins goes to work for the FBI on an assignment with deadly consequencesLloyd Hopkins is breaking down. Once the sharpest detective in Los Angeles homicide, the strain of nearly two decades steeped in death has begun to take its toll. His confidence is shot, his self-discipline gone, and he has become prone to fits of uncontrollable sobbing. As his marriage collapses, he forgets how to keep himself disengaged from a case. His habits of sleeping with witnesses, faking evidence, and taking the law into his own hands has disgraced the LAPD, and now Hopkins's superiors are attempting to force him into early retirement.When he refuses, the department puts him out to pasture with a position as a liaison with the FBI bank robbery unit. The post is meant to be low-stress and murder-free, but where Lloyd Hopkins goes, blood always follows . . .

Because the Night

While scouring the streets for a missing cop, an L.A. detective uncovers a terrifying crimeThere was never a better cop than Jungle Jack Herzog. A wiry man whose strength exceeded his frame, his ability to navigate the darkest corners of the City of Angels drew him repeated citations for bravery. Nicknamed the Alchemist for his uncanny ability to fake new identities, he did his best work as an undercover agent in the vice squad, disappearing into the underworld in the name of justice. Now he has disappeared for good.It's a bad sign that Lloyd Hopkins catches Jungle Jack's case, because Hopkins works homicide. As he attempts to discover what happened to the missing cop, he investigates a strange murder committed with a revolver that predates the Civil War. There is a horrifying secret behind the cop's disappearance, but Lloyd Hopkins does not fear the truth.

Hollywood Nocturnes

A novella and five short stories from one of the most hard-boiled writers in American crime fictionNobody plays accordion like Dick Contino. His skilled fingers can find beauty in even the schmaltziest borscht belt favorites, and with his matinee-idol looks he could be a real star. Right now, though, he's slumming it as the headliner in a Grade Z teenybopper picture called Daddy-O. He's too good for this movie, and finishing it is going to take him to a very dark place.Daddy-O and Dick Contino are both real, their stories dredged out of the past by James Ellroy, a master of historical crime fiction. In Dick Contino's Blues he takes us to B-List Hollywood in 1957a time when movies were cheerful and dirty secrets lurked just off camera. Included along with the novella are five short stories, all in the author's inimitable tough-bitten style.

The Black Dahlia

Los Angeles, 15th January 1947: a beautiful young woman walked into the night and met her horrific destiny. Five days later, her tortured body was found drained of blood and cut in half. The newspapers called her 'The Black Dahlia'. Two cops are caught up in the investigation and embark on a hellish journey that takes them to the core of the dead girl's twisted life...

The Big Nowhere

A startling panorama of Los Angeles in the fifties. New Year's Eve as 1949 turns to 1950, Los Angeles: The City of Angels has becomes the city of the Angel of Death. Communist witch-hunts and insanely violent killings are terrorising the community. Three men are plunged into a maelstrom of violence and deceit when their lives become inextricably linked as each one confronts his own personal darkness. The second of the LA Quartet, the epigraph for The Big Nowhere is a passage from a novel; It was written that I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice- Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness.

The Hilliker Curse My Pursuit of Women

America's greatest living crime writer gives us a raw, brutally candid memoir-as high intensity and as riveting as any of his novels-about his obsessive search for atonement in women. The year was 1958.Jean Hilliker had divorced her fast-buck hustler husband and resurrected her maiden name.Her son, James, was ten years old.He hated and lusted for his mother and summoned her dead. She was murdered three months later. The Hilliker Curse is a predator's confession, a treatise on guilt and the power of malediction, and above all a cri de c ur. Ellroy unsparingly describes his shattered childhood, his delinquent teens, his writing life, his love affairs and marriages, his nervous breakdown and the beginning of a relationship with an extraordinary woman who may just be the long-sought Her. A layered narrative of time and place, emotion and insight, sexuality and spiritual quest, The Hilliker Curse is a brilliant, soul-baring revelation of self.It is unlike any memoir you have ever read.

White Jazz

Best-selling crime fiction author James Ellroy returns with the fourth in his LA Quartet. Los Angeles, 1958: a city on the make. A boom town at the edge of a new era ripe for plunder. Lieutenant Dave Klein: in turn a lawyer, bagman, slum landlord, mob killer. Klein stands at the centre of a complex web of plots where violence and death will intersect. 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...

LA Confidential Classic Noir

Ellroy's back with the third of his LA Quartet! Christmas 1951, Los Angeles: a city where the police are as crooked as the criminals. Six prisoners are beaten senseless in their cells by cops crazed on alcohol. For the three L.A.P.D. detectives involved, it will expose the guilty secrets on which they have built their corrupt and violent careers...The novel takes these cops on a sprawling epic of brutal violence and the murderous seedy side of Hollywood. One of the best (and longest) crime novels ever written, it is the heart of Ellroy's four-novel masterpiece, the LA Quartet, and an example of crime writing at its most powerful.

The Best American Noir of the Century

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.

Blood on the Moon

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.

Because the Night

Three citizens are butchered during a liquor store holdup. An unstable veteran cop vanishes without a trace. Nothing connects these events except for a nagging hunch in the back of Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins' brain-a sinister foreboding that will lead him through the sin-and-sleaze playground of nighttime LA on the trail of a psycho psychiatrist with a talent for terror and mind-control. His gore-soaked journey through hell will plunge this determined manhunter into the dark heart of madness-and beyond.

My Dark Places

America's greatest crime writer investigates his mother's murder. On 21 June 1958, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy left her home in California. She was found strangled the next day. Her ten year-old son James had been with her estranged husband all weekend and was informed of her death on his return. Her murderer was never found, but her death had an enduring effect on her son - he spent his teens and early adult years as a wino, petty burglar and derelict. Only later, through his obsession with crime fiction, triggered by his mother's murder, did Ellroy begin to delve into his past. Shortly after the publication of his groundbreaking novel WHITE JAZZ, he determined to return to Los Angeles and, with the help of veteran detective Bill Stoner, attempt to solve the 38-year-old killing. The result is one of the few classics of crime non-fiction and autobiography to appear in the last few decades; a hypnotic trip to America's underbelly and one man's tortured soul.

Hilliker Curse

The legendary crime writer gives us a raw, brutally candid memoiras high intensity and as riveting as any of his novelsabout his obsessive search for atonement in women.The year was 1958. Jean Hilliker had divorced her fast-buck hustler husband and resurrected her maiden name. Her son, James, was ten years old. He hated and lusted after his mother and summoned her dead. She was murdered three months later.The Hilliker Curse is a predators confession, a treatise on guilt and on the power of malediction, and above all, a cri de cur. James Ellroy unsparingly describes his shattered childhood, his delinquent teens, his writing life, his love affairs and marriages, his nervous breakdown, and the beginning of a relationship with an extraordinary woman who may just be the long-sought Her. A layered narrative of time and place, emotion and insight, sexuality and spiritual quest, The Hilliker Curse is a brilliant, soul-baring revelation of self. It is unlike any memoir you have ever read.From the Hardcover edition.

The Cold Six Thousand

DALLAS, NOVEMBER 22ND, 1963. Wayne Tedrow Jr has arrived to kill a man. The fee is $6,000. He finds himself instead in the middle of the cover-up following JFK's assassination. There follows a hellish five-year ride through the sordid underbelly of public policy via Las Vegas, Howard Hughes, Vietnam, CIA dope dealing, Cuba, sleazy showbiz, racism and the Klan. This is the 1960s under Ellroy's blistering lens, the icons of the era mingled with cops, killers, hoods, and provocateurs. The Cold Six Thousand is historical confluence as American nightmare. Fierce, epic fiction. A masterpiece.

American Tabloid

The first novel in Ellroy's extraordinary Underworld USA Trilogy as featured on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read. 1958. America is about to emerge into a bright new age - an age that will last until the 1000 days of John F Kennedy's presidency. Three men move beneath the glossy surface of power, men allied to the makers and shakers of the era. Pete Bondurant - Howard Hughes's right-hand man, Jimmy Hoffa's hitman. Kemper Boyd - employed by J Edgar Hoover to infiltrate the Kennedy clan. Ward Littell - a man seeking redemption in Bobby Kennedy's drive against organised crime. The festering discount of the age that burns brightly in these men's hearts will go into supernova as the Bay of Pigs ends in calamity, the Mob clamours for payback and the 1000 days ends in brutal quietus in 1963.

Blood's A Rover

It's 1968. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King are dead. The Mob, Howard Hughes and J Edgar Hoover are in a struggle for America's soul, drawing into their murderous conspiracies the damned and the soon-to-be damned. WAYNE TEDROW JR: parricide, assassin, dope cooker, mouthpiece for all sides, loyal to none. His journey will take him deeper into the darkness. DWIGHT HOLLY: Hoover's enforcer and hellish conspirator in terrible crimes. As Hoover's power wanes, his destiny lurches towards Richard Nixon and self-annihilation. DON CRUTCHFIELD: a kid, a nobody, a wheelman and a private detective who stumbles upon an ungodly conspiracy from which he and the country may never recover. All three men are drawn to women on the opposite side of the political and moral spectrum; all are compromised and ripe for destruction. Blood's a Rover is an incandescent fusion of fact and fiction, and is James Ellroy's greatest masterpiece.

Blood's a Rover

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 countermeasures. 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 Tedrowex-cop and heroin runneris 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 powermongers of an incendiary era. Their lives collide in pursuit of the Red Goddess Joanand each of them will pay ';a dear and savage price to live History.'Political noir as only James Ellroy can write itour recent past razed and fully reconstructedBlood's A Rover is a novel of astonishing depth and scope, a massive tale of corruption and retribution, of ideals at war and the extremity of love. It is the largest and greatest work of fiction from an American master.From the Hardcover edition.

Suicide Hill

In disgrace after a badly handled arrest in New Orleans, Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins is assigned as a liaison officer to an FBI investigation into a series of diabolical and clever bank robberies. Three men have done their homework: they choose bank managers who are having affairs, kidnap their girlfriends, and force the managers to open the banks early. When the bank robbers turn violent, Hopkins finds himself with a bit of information he would rather not have-information about police corruption that reaches into the office of his sworn enemy Fred Gaffney, head of the Internal Affairs Division.

White Jazz

The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia.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, "e;a bad cop to draw the heat,"e; 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, "e;forty-two and going on dead,"e; it's dues time.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.Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor edge, White Jazz is crime fiction at its most shattering.

Black Dahlia

On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahliaand so begins the greatest manhunt in California history.Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard. Both are obsessed with the Dahliadriven 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 psychesinto a region of total madness.

Dudley Smith Trio The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, White Jazz

The Big Nowhere: In 1950s LA three men are drawn into the shadow of communist witch hunts and violent killings that force each one to confront his own personal darkness. But none is prepared for the maelstrom that awaits them. LA Confidential: LA Christmas 1951. Six prisoners are beaten senseless in their cells by cops crazed on alcohol. For the three LAD cops involved, it will expose the guilty secrets on which they built their corrupt and voilent careers. White Jazz: LAPD Lieutenant Dave Klein made the mean streets he works on mean. But now the FBI are out to get the cops who murder, bribe and beat to serve their corrupt careers and Klein is hung out as bait. Big fish leap at his throat - racketeers, narcotic kings and scum with skeletons they would kill to keep hidden. Three of the most epic and powerful crime novels ever written, this volume is an explosive journey through the dark side of recent American history, and crime writing at its best.

Crime Wave

James Ellroy is a unique and powerful writer with a tough and explosive voice. His obsession with the dark side of L. A. is personal and vital, triggered by the murder of his mother when he was ten. This defining event spawned an early addiction to paperback crime novels, and Ellroy's own writing is saturated in an often violent underworld of bent cops, politicians, stars, sleeze and rumour. Ellroy exploits memory, history, fact and fiction with relentless energy and panache. What emerges is an intense, mythical version of tinseltown in the second half of the twentieth century.

L.A. Noir The Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy: Blood on the Moon, Because the Night, Suicide Hill

Three of Ellroy's most compelling novels featuring Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins in one volume. Blood On The Moon: 20 random killings of women are unconnected in police files. But Det. Sgt. Lloyd Hopkins sees a pattern. As he is drawn to the murderer, the two men face a confrontation pitting icy intelligence against white-heated madness. . . Because The Night: Jacob Herzog, hero cop, has disappeared. A multiple murder committed with a pre-Civil War revolver remains unsolved. Are the two cases connected? As Det. Sgt. Lloyd Hopkins pieces the puzzle together he discovers the darker threat of John Haviland, a psychiatrist whose pleasure comes from the manipulation of the weak and lonely. Suicide Hill: Duane Rice leaves jail with good news and bad news: two adulterous bank managers are ripe for squeezing, but Vandy, who he is obsessed with making a rock star, has disappeared. An orgy of violence erupts as Duane's partner goes beserk and Duane settles scores with knife and bullet. Leading the manhunt Sgt. Lloyd Hopkins stumbles on a horrifying conspiracy of corruption and betrayal- among his own colleagues. Ellroy's three great early novels are available in one volume for the first time - the books that led up to his LA Quartet.

Brown's Requiem

Los Angeles - Fritz Brown, ex-alcoholic private eye with a stained past, makes do with car repossessions and classical music. Then he is offered a case by Freddy 'Fat Dog' Baker, an eccentric golf caddy whose sister has made off with a much older man. This is the beginning of the nightmare: the underworld of golf caddies arson and incest played against the backdrop of an LA surreal by night and bad by day; of long hidden secrets that will drive Brown back to the bottle and to the gun: all conspire to make this one of the most hypnotic crime novels ever written.

Dick Contino's Blues And Other Stories

Dick Contino - 50s accordian player, a star in the making, is destroyed by a draft-dodging scandal. His life is on the skids until he comes up with the idea of resurrecting his career with a fake kidnapping scam. meanwhile a serial killer is on the loose in Los Angeles...a killer who is closer to Contino than he suspects - a killer who wants in on the kidnap - for real... Plus five previously unpublished short stories.

Silent Terror

1953-1983: 30 years of American society, from the hope of Eisenhower's presidency, to the kinky flower generation, through the death of the dream, Charles Manson, the beginning of the twisted nightmare and the moral backlash of the 80s. One Man's crimes span these years and the length and breadth of America. Martin Michael Plunkett - of genius level intelligence, articulate, ruthless, yet deranged sex killer. And beneath his calm veneer, rage voices implanted in his mind in one of the defing and deeply buried moment of his life, a moment so shocking that it takes him thirty years to bring it back into his consciousness. Sentenced to life in Sing Sing prison, Plunkett begins his autobio-graphical memoir, an account of more than fifty killing that made him America's most wanted serial killer and its greatest enigma. His account will drive even those who brought him to justice to despair.

L.A. Confidential

Suicide Hill

Joe caught Klein flush in the stomach and ripped upward with both hands. Blood spurted from his mouth... SUICIDE HILL It was simple... and diabolical. Simply select a bank manager, kidnap his girlfriend, then hold her hostage until you've cleaned out the bank. At first, it was almost a game. But it turned into an orgy of violence, rape and insane revenge. Investigating is Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins, eager for a chance to clear his tarnished reputation. But what Hopkins doesn't know is that this time, the enemy is within.

The Big Nowhere

Blood On The Moon

Somewhere out there is a murderer with over twenty killings to his name - each an apparently random slaying of a woman, over a twenty-year period and all unconnnected on the police files. But Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins begins to see a pattern: he senses connections between this string of seemingly motiveless, pointless and unsolved killings. Then the murderer emerges not as a random killer, but a cool, efficient despatcher - in his own eyes a saver of souls and protector of the innocent. As they are drawn inexorably together, Hopkins and the murderer challenge each other in a confrontation which pits icy intelligence against white-heated madness...