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James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the acclaimed LA Quartet, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz, as well as the first two parts of his Underworld USA trilogy, American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand which were both Sunday Times bestsellers.
In 2011 James Ellroy was awarded the French Order of Arts and Letters by France's culture minister Frederic Mitterand. Mitterand described Ellroy as "the master of dark dreams" and called him "one of the most prominent names in modern literature".
Ellroy's editor at William Heinemann, Jason Arthur, said: "If the purpose of this honour is to recognise a significant contribution to literature, then it is richly deserved. It reaffirms my belief that his writing truly transcends genre and easy labels—James is quite simply one of the best novelists writing today."
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.
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.
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...
Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 14 October 2010. A candid and sometimes shocking memoir from one of the greatest thriller writers of the last century. Ellroy's obsessive relationship with his mother is laid bare giving us a fascinating insight in tot he mind of the author and the past that has influenced all his writing. In 2011 James Ellroy was awarded the French Order of Arts and Letters by France's culture minister Frederic Mitterand. Mitterand described Ellroy as "the master of dark dreams" and called him "one of the most prominent names in modern literature".Ellroy's editor at William Heinemann, Jason Arthur, said: "If the purpose of this honour is to recognise a significant contribution to literature, then it is richly deserved. It reaffirms my belief that his writing truly transcends genre and easy labels—James is quite simply one of the best novelists writing today."
________________________ 'Ellroy writes with raw power ... undeniably one of the most influential crime writers of our time' THE TIMES 'a tangled fever-dream ... Ellroy offers a grandiose, Wagnerian vision of wartime LA' SUNDAY TIMES ________________________ A brilliant historical crime novel, set in Los Angeles and Mexico during the pulse-pounding aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. January, '42. L.A. reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops tag it a routine dead-man job. They're wrong. It's an early-warning signal of Chaos. There's a murderous fire and a gold heist exploding out of the past. There's Fifth Column treason - at this moment, on American soil. There are homegrown Nazis, commies and race racketeers. There's two dead cops in a dive off the jazz-club strip. And three men and one woman have a hot date with History. Elmer Jackson is a corrupt Vice cop. He's a flesh peddler and a bagman for the L.A. Chief of Police. Hideo Ashida is a crime-lab whiz, lashed by anti-Japanese rage. Dudley Smith is a PD hardnose working Army Intelligence. He's gone rogue and gone all-the-way fascist. Joan Conville was born rogue. She's a defrocked Navy lieutenant and a war profiteer to her core. L.A., '42. Homefront madness ascendant. Early-wartime inferno - This Storm is James Ellroy's most audacious novel yet. It is by turns savage, tender, elegiac. It lays bare and celebrates crazed Americans of all stripes. ________________________ 'Epic crime writing from a master' DAILY MAIL 'Ellroy is unique. There is nobody writing this way ... Nobody has done or is doing what he is doing' BOOKMUNCH
________________________ 'Ellroy writes with raw power ... undeniably one of the most influential crime writers of our time' THE TIMES 'a tangled fever-dream ... Ellroy offers a grandiose, Wagnerian vision of wartime LA' SUNDAY TIMES ________________________ A brilliant historical crime novel, set in Los Angeles and Mexico during the pulse-pounding aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. January, '42. L.A. reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops tag it a routine dead-man job. They're wrong. It's an early-warning signal of Chaos. There's a murderous fire and a gold heist exploding out of the past. There's Fifth Column treason - at this moment, on American soil. There are homegrown Nazis, commies and race racketeers. There's two dead cops in a dive off the jazz-club strip. And three men and one woman have a hot date with History. Elmer Jackson is a corrupt Vice cop. He's a flesh peddler and a bagman for the L.A. Chief of Police. Hideo Ashida is a crime-lab whiz, lashed by anti-Japanese rage. Dudley Smith is a PD hardnose working Army Intelligence. He's gone rogue and gone all-the-way fascist. Joan Conville was born rogue. She's a defrocked Navy lieutenant and a war profiteer to her core. L.A., '42. Homefront madness ascendant. Early-wartime inferno - This Storm is James Ellroy's most audacious novel yet. It is by turns savage, tender, elegiac. It lays bare and celebrates crazed Americans of all stripes. ________________________ 'Epic crime writing from a master' DAILY MAIL 'Ellroy is unique. There is nobody writing this way ... Nobody has done or is doing what he is doing' BOOKMUNCH
The Black Dahlia depicts the infrastructure of L.A.'s most sensational murder case. A young cop morphs into the obsessed lover and lust-crazed avenger. His rogue investigation is a one-way ticket to hell. The Big Nowhere blends the crime novel with the political novel. It is winter, 1950, and the L.A. authorities are targeting movieland Reds. The three cops assigned to the job are out to grab all the kudos they can. But a series of brutal sex killing intervenes ... L.A. Confidential plumbs the depths: political corruption, scandal-rag journalism, racism and gangland wars, savage slaughter in an all-night hash house. And the inglorious Los Angeles Police Department to disentangle the conspiracy that links it all together. White Jazz gives us the tortured confession of a cop who's gone to the bad - killer, slum landlord and parasitic exploiter. He's also a pawn in a police power struggle and beginning to realize it. But he's just met a woman and wants to claw his way out of the pit. Somehow.
Blood's a Rover takes us into the 70s. RFK and MLK are dead. A kid private eye clashes with a mob goon and an enforcer for FBI director Edgar Hoover in L.A. There's an armoured-car heist and a cache of missing emeralds. Revolution brews in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Amidst all this, all three anti-heros fall for Red revolutionary Joan Rosen Klein. Each will pay 'a dear and savage price to live History'.
American Tabloid gives us John F. Kennedy's rise and fall from an insider's perspective. We're there for the rigged 1960 election and for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. We're the eyes and ears and souls of three rogue cops who've signed on for the ride and come to see Jack as their betrayer. And we're there in Dallas in 1963 where it all comes to a brutal end. The Cold Six Thousand the cover-up for the Kennedy assassination begins. This time the ride takes us from Dallas to Vietnam to Las Vegas to Memphis to Cuba to the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. We're rubbing shoulders Klansmen and mafiosi, killers, hoods and provocateurs. WIth Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And of course a lot of corrupt policemen. Blood's a Rover takes us into the 70s. RFK and MLK are dead. A kid private eye clashes with a mob goon and an enforcer for FBI director Edgar Hoover in L.A. There's an armoured-car heist and a cache of missing emeralds. Revolution brews in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Amidst all this, all three anti-heros fall for Red revolutionary Joan Rosen Klein. Each will pay 'a dear and savage price to live History'. The American dream as Nightmare.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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