Amazon.com (ISBN 0712677887, Paperback)

James Ellroy's trademark is his language: it is sometimes caustically funny and always brazen. When he's hitting on all cylinders, as he is in My Dark Places, his style makes punchy rhythms out of short sentences using lingo such as "scoot" (dollar), "trim" (sex), and "brace" (to interrogate). But the premise for My Dark Places is what makes it especially compelling: Ellroy goes back to his own childhood to investigate the central mystery behind his obsession with violence against women--the death of his mother when he was 10 years old. It's hard to imagine a more psychologically treacherous, more self-exposing way in which to write about true crime. The New York Times calls it a "strenuously involving book.... Early on, Mr. Ellroy makes a promise to his dead mother that seems maudlin at first: 'I want to give you breath.' But he's done just that and--on occasion--taken ours away."

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0712677887, Paperback)

2 cassettes / 3 hours
Read by the Author


"Astonishing . . . original, daring, brilliant."
--Philadelphia Inquirer

In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb.  Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running.  He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself.  

In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten--and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.

"Ellroy is more powerful than ever."
--The Nation  

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0517369621, Hardcover)

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.

Amazon.com (ISBN 0679459413, Audio Cassette)

James Ellroy's hard-boiled detective fiction is like Raymond Chandler's with a darker post-modern edge. His heroes are almost as nasty as the scum they track through a sordid underworld. This non-fiction book is written in much the same style as his fiction, with his trademark staccato prose, his expletive-laden dialog, his air of worldly cynicism. Yet here Ellroy is writing of a real-life murder, that of his own mother, who was strangled to death in sensational film noir circumstances in 1958 when he was ten. Ellroy's memoir tells how he hired a retired police detective to help him investigate the never-solved crime. Ellroy gets to play a real private P.I. as the two follow various leads. They don't close the case, but the book reveals some of the demons that have fueled Ellroy's fiction.

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0679762051, Paperback)

"Astonishing . . . original, daring, brilliant."
--Philadelphia Inquirer

In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb.  Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running.  He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself.  

In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten--and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.

"Ellroy is more powerful than ever."
--The Nation