Best police procedural books to add to your reading list

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The Enchanters

'Nobody does crime like James Ellroy . . . One of Ellroy's best works in years' Sunday Times 
 
'This is the master of darkness at his incomparable best — simply impossible to put down' Daily Mail 
 
Los Angeles. August 4, 1962. The city broils through a mid-summer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker's looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash. 
 
The freewheeling Freddy O. Tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim "Opportunity is Love." Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe's death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle. We are with him as he tears through all those who block his path to the truth. We are with him as he penetrates the faux-sunshine of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the shuck of Camelot. We are with him as he falters, and grasps for love beyond opportunity. We are with him as he tracks Marilyn Monroe's horrific last charade through a nightmare L.A. that he served to create - and as he confronts his complicity and his own raging madness. 
 
It's the Summer of '62, baby. Freddy O.'s got a hot date with history. The savage Sixties are ready to pop. The Rolling Stones proclaim it best: We're just a shout away. 
 
The Enchanters is a transcendent work of American popular fiction. It is James Ellroy at his most crazed, brilliant, provocative, profanely hilarious, and stop-your-heart tender. It is a luminous psychological drama. It is an unparalleled thrill ride. It is resoundingly the great American crime novel. 
 
'This entire book is one gleefully violent foul-mouthed research note. It’s vivid, gripping, surreal' Spectator

Epic mashups of historical fact and filthy fantasy . . . no one does it better than Ellroy

The Times, 'Best new crime fiction for September 2023'

This entire book is one gleefully violent foul-mouthed research note. It’s vivid, gripping, surreal

No one captures the nightmare that lies behind the American dream better than the unforgettable Ellroy . . . This is the master of darkness at his incomparable best — simply impossible to put down

Nobody does crime like James Ellroy . . . One of Ellroy's best works in years

One of the great American writers of our time

Ask me to name the best living novelist who's fierce, brave, funny, scatological, beautiful, convoluted, and paranoid . . . and it becomes simple: James Ellroy. If insanity illuminated by highly dangerous strokes of literary lightning is your thing, then Ellroy is your man

Truly invigorating . . . demonically riveting

If you like conspiracy theories you’ll relish James Ellroy’s brutal, unbelievably hard-boiled take on the death of Marilyn Monroe

I enjoyed The Enchanters, James Ellroy's sleazy, scabrous riff on the death of Marilyn Monroe

JAMES ELLROY was born in Los Angeles. He is the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s A Rover; and the L.A. Quartet novels: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He is also the author of two other Freddy Otash novels, Widespread Panic and The Enchanters. He was awarded the 2022 Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. He lives in Colorado.

Los Angeles. August 4, 1962. The city broils through a mid-summer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker's looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash. 
 
The freewheeling Freddy O. Tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim "Opportunity is Love." Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe's death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle. We are with him as he tears through all those who block his path to the truth. We are with him as he penetrates the faux-sunshine of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the shuck of Camelot. We are with him as he falters, and grasps for love beyond opportunity. We are with him as he tracks Marilyn Monroe's horrific last charade through a nightmare L.A. that he served to create - and as he confronts his complicity and his own raging madness.

Widespread Panic

Extraordinary... Ellroy's legion of fans will love it

A characteristically vigorous tour of his established territory ... Like drinking a pint of espresso

Very definitely one for Ellroy fans to lap up like warm milk

What astonishes at first is how an apparently breathless style forces you to slow down: there are passages where the prose reads more like poetry. It's writing to relish, even if the events described are a non-stop cavalcade of debauchery, double-dealing, drugs, drama, deceit, and death. The Demon Dog delivers, indubitably

Ellroy still lives and breathes in the 1950s and no one could have come up with a book like this but him. Fascinating, gripping, dubious but unique

Graphic, stunning and in many instances hilarious. . . . No punches are pulled, and no literary expense is spared

This 1950s standalone outing, told in a lacerating first person, represents the barely coherent confessions of a corrupt cop who has become an equally compromised private investigator for the scandal mag Confidential. Freddy Otash leads the reader through a Dante's Inferno reimagined as a sleazy Hollywood (with real-life figures galore - such as film star James Dean - all handled in scurrilous fashion) as he tracks down the killer of one of Kennedy's mistresses. Purgatory is rarely this much fun

Widespread Panic is quintessential Ellroy, but with enough alliteration, Hollyweird flavor, booze, distressed damsels, communist conspiracies, and extortion to make this the most Ellroy novel he's ever written. . . . Wildly entertaining and memorable. . . . Otash's voice is unlike anything else in contemporary fiction. . . . A spiritual companion to L.A. Confidential

There is here, as in Ellroy's other novels, so fully researched and plausible an evocation of the world about which he writes, so deft an intermingling of the real and fictional characters that the novelist asks the reader to believe that these events could have happened, and that some of them (Jack Kennedy's exhaustive and exhausting philandering, for example) probably did. This commingling of fact and fiction is, of course, the basis upon which the myths of Hollywood, and hence, at this point, those of our broader American culture, rest

[Ellroy is] the dean of Los Angeles crime novelists. . . . You come [to Ellroy] to roll around in the blood and the mud, to ping along to the plot twists and betrayals

If you love Ellroy, you'll love this wild ride

The Washington Post (10 Books to read in June)

Devious and delicious. . . . Ellroy's total command of the jazzy, alliterative argot of the era never fails to astonish. This is a must for L.A. noir fans

Wildly flamboyant. . . . A spectacular explosion of language. For those with a taste for foul-mouthed fireworks and freeform jazz solos, both dazzling and exhausting, Ellroy is your man

A noirish romp through the sewage of 1950s Hollywood sleaze. . . . Entertainingly hop-headed. . . . The author [is] operating at maximum efficiency, mainlining a primo blend of over-the-top alliteration and down-in-the-gutter scandal. . . . A delirious thrill ride through the tabloid underbelly of Tinseltown. Relentlessly rabid, for those with a taste for the seamier

Freddy is an ex-L.A. cop on the skids. He snuffed a cop killer in cold blood - and it got to him bad. Now he's a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp - and, most notably, the head strongarm goon for Confidential magazine. 
 
Welcome to the world of the malevolent monarch of the Hollywood underground - a tale of pervasive paranoia teeming with communist conspiracies, FBI finks, celebrity smut films and strange bedfellows.

This Storm

The second novel in Ellroy's second 'L.A. Quartet', which began with the publication of Perfidia in 2014.

Ellroy writes with raw power … James Ellroy writes big … Ellroy is undeniably one of the most influential crime writers of our time. But can the raw energy of his fiction outweigh the disgustingness and balderdash? Yes; if you see his novels as antidotes to the fake sunshine that Los Angeles, via the big screen, has blown in the world’s face for a century.

James Ellroy is one of America’s greatest living crime novelists … This Storm [is] a tangled fever-dream set in 1942 Los Angeles … Good, unclean fun … Ellroy offers a grandiose, Wagnerian vision of wartime LA … Packed with almost every Ellroy obsession under the sun: murder, robbery, rape and torture; small-time corruption and big-time history; sexual intrigue and moral ambivalence; lust, yearning, racism, alcoholism, degeneracy and drug abuse; plastic surgery, prostitution, policemen and paedophilia; scandal, sodomy and sin … I will live and die an Ellroy fanboy.

Ellroy remains one of the most exciting literary stylists in the English language … It’s been five years since the last novel from the self-described “Demon Dog” of American letters, but it’s worth the wait. Like all good jazzmen, Ellroy works very hard indeed to make his music flow so easily.

James Ellroy writes coarse, prurient, paranoid novels that often turn out to be masterpieces ... Truffling for atrocities in the dirty reality of crime seems to inspire him with a demonic energy that his distinctive telegraphic style is the perfect instrument to convey … There are some terrific stretches – including an account of the “Battle of Los Angeles”, the night in 1942 when a mass delusion arose that the city was under aerial attack – that ranks among his best setpieces.

Ellroy has never been a five-pages-before-bed kind of writer; his vision is more the fever dream after lights out.

This Storm, a baroqueand playful masterwork, is repulsive and propulsive, obsessive and compulsive. The juvenile delinquent has become nothing lessthan a giant of American literature.

Like Tolstoy, the American crime writer’s novels are big and bold affairs […] however, Ellroy is probably closer to Dostoevsky, whose work consistently exposed the darker side of human nature and the perpetual temptation between good and evil.

Historical crime doesn’t get more exciting than this.

________________________ 
'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

Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy Vol. 2

Blood's a Rover

'America was never innocent.' 
Thus begins the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. It's James Ellroy's pop history of the 1960s, his window-peeper's view of government misconduct, his dirty trickster's take on the great events of an incendiary era. It's a tour de force of the American idiom, and an acknowledged masterpiece.

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'.

Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy Vol.1

American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand

'America was never innocent.' 
Thus begins the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. It's James Ellroy's pop history of the 1960s, his window-peeper's view of government misconduct, his dirty trickster's take on the great events of an incendiary era. It's a tour de force of the American idiom, and an acknowledged masterpiece.

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.

The L.A. Quartet

Here in one volume is James Ellroy's epic re-imagining of the dark underside of postwar Los Angeles. A groundbreaking work of American crime fiction.

Ask me to name the best living novelist who's fierce, brave, funny, scatalogical, beautiful, convoluted, and paranoid ... and it becomes simple: James Ellroy.

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.

Destination: Morgue

The second volume of the James Ellroy's previously uncollected writings: true crime, sex, scandal and a sizzling new novella.

James Ellory is a genius: the finest American crime writer since Raymond Chandler, and one of the most readable experimental writers in the world

All Ellroy's preoccupations are present: corruption, sex, violence, unsolved murders and excess by the dozen. As ever the results are fascinating as a car crash

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 its own howling, breathtaking brand of powerful, pumped-up poetry

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.

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

Perfidia

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER. 
 
This is World War Two as you have never seen it. 
 
This is America as only Ellroy can write it.

There has never been a writer like James Ellroy.

An epic and bizarrely transcendental novel that represents an extraordinary achievement by any measure … a genuinely impressive feat of sustained literary energy: 90% of novelists couldn't get anywhere near it…His is an awe-inspiring artistic vision and this is a novel that should surely be read by new readers as well as fans.

The master of American crime fiction.

A triumphant return to the violent fictional world where he started – 1940s Los Angeles … Fans will not be disappointed ... It is populated by many of Ellroy’s most memorable monsters, notably LAPD Sgt Dudley Smith … Reading it made me want to return to the original Quartet.

James Ellroy is back doing what he does best, weaving a tangle of tales set in wartime Los Angeles…I look forward, eagerly, to the next three instalments.

There surely can’t be a more richly or brutally realised city in world literature than James Ellroy’s Los Angeles ... The shock and awe of Ellroy’s propulsive vision remains visceral, and reading him is about as physical as reading can get without being hit over the head by a book.

The question any aficionado will ask is does it compare with prime Ellroy. The short answer is yes … Perfidia’s greatest achievement might be the style in which it renders history – subjective, fictionalised history, but history nonetheless – in lurid 3D colour. They should teach this stuff in school.

Ellroy’s customary command of language is overwhelming…Ellroy is still trying to expand the parameters of the crime novel…Exhilarating prose.

An impressively detailed reconstruction of Los Angeles in wartime … Perfidia’s high-octane hard-boiled energy draws the reader in.

A sprawling, beguiling and hugely entertaining tale … a typically sprawling, chaotic, pulsating tale of crime and punishment on a huge canvas, every page thrumming to the furious tension between his ambition and his delivery.

A visceral triumph proving Ellroy remains at the top of his game.

Ellroy depicts with frightening authenticity how those innocent of crimes are knowingly framed in the interest of the almighty "greater good".'

One of the most courageous literary endeavours of recent times … Perfidia is a crime novel but mainly in the sense that it investigates deeper than before the ultimate crime of war, and the meta-crime that is society itself … Perfidia is a brave and moral book. It is not a beautiful book. Its defining characteristic is honesty, its engine principle, qualities that are vanishingly rare in contemporary fiction. It may be set in the 1940s, at a very specific and not so very distant moment in historical time, but its real subject is now.

Master of the sharp, snarling, spare sentence James Ellroy kicks off another mighty four-book run…A bloody big read but every word’s made to count at gunpoint. Ellroy kicks ass all round the ballpark.

Perfidia is a brilliant, breakneck ride. Nobody except James Ellroy could pull this off. He doesn't merely write - he ignites and demolishes.

A war novel like no other…“Dark desires sizzle” and explode with a furious climax. Ellroy is not only back in form – he’s raised the stakes.

One of the most original and daring writers alive.

It’s an epic 687-page undertaking that is at times disturbingly violent – a must for noir fans.

Ellroy, writing in his signature telegraphic style, strives to depict reality, every dark aspect of it: there’s murder, apparent ritual suicides, hate crimes and a world of characters that you just cannot root for. Ellroy successfully establishes his four main characters, alongside a wealth of fully developed, clever and sophisticated secondary characters, within his own creation of a microcosm of a community challenged by politics and an unavoidable history.

James Ellroy is the best crime writer in the world.

A brash, two-fisted tour-de-force of spleen and invective which holds up a cracked and tarnished mirror to a turbulent period of American history … powerful in scope, theme and character … for blood and guts, he could give Beowulf a run for its money … it is impossible to deny the power and energy that has gone into Perfidia, which is more than a crime novel whilst showing, at the same time, what the crime novel is capable of.

The prose is as tight and fast moving as ever … If you are in pursuit of vintage Ellroy, this book is for you.

A sprawling, uncompromising epic of crime and depravity.

As unflinching and sharp as ever, even more so . . . Perfidia might be his [Ellroy’s] finest novel yet . . . Its story is full of tectonic movements, fascinating and dangerous characters with ambiguous morality, and events bigger than life itself. It’s brilliant in its complexity and vastness.

JAMES ELLROY was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the ‘Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy’ – American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and Blood's a Rover – and the ‘L.A. Quartet’ novels, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz. He lives in Los Angeles.

'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. 
 
Following the hellish murder of a Japanese family, three men and one woman are summoned. William H. Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police. He's superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith - Irish émigré, 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.

Clandestine

A scintillating novel of sex and murder in 50s LA

One of the most original and daring writers alive

The most distinctive crime writer of his generation

Ellroy is a unique voice in American fiction

One of the most important popular fiction writers in America, whose best books take their readers to the darkest places of the human condition - a Tinseltown Dostoevsky

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. His most recent novel, Blood's a Rover, completes the magisterial 'Underworld USA Trilogy' - the first two volumes of which (American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand) were both Sunday Times bestsellers.

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

The extraordinary debut novel from the indomitable demon dog: James Ellroy

The man who calls himself the "demon dog" of American crime fiction is still the classiest act around.

The outstanding American crime writer of his generation.

Ellroy is a master at juggling plot lines, using a stripped, spare noir style that hits like a cleaver but is honed like a scalpel

An undeniably artful frenzy of violence, guilt and unappeased self-loathing. Ellroy's crime fiction represents a high mark in the genre

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.

Because the Night

The second installment of the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948, and now lives in New York. Because of the Night is his fourth crime mystery, and the second featuring Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins.

The second installment of the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy. As Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins pieces the puzzle together he discovers the darker threat of John Havilland, a psychiatrist whose pleasure comes from the manipulation of the weak and the lonely ... 
 
And, as Hopkins closes in, Havilland's madness rages uncontrolled - and forces a shattering confrontation with the darker side of the human mind.

The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, White Jazz

Dudley Smith Trio

Three of James Ellroy's most gripping crime novels featuring Lieutenant Dudley Smith in one volume

The most original crime writer of our time

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 his Underworld USA trilogy; American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s A Rover.

Three of James Ellroy's most gripping crime novels featuring Lieutenant Dudley Smith in one volume. 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.

White Jazz

Four of James Ellroy's most popular crime novels featuring the infamous Dudley Smith, which include: 'The Black Dahlia', 'The Big Nowhere', 'L.A. Confidential' and 'White Jazz'.

Best-selling crime fiction author James Ellroy returns with the fourth in his LA Quartet

'The king of macho noir' GUARDIAN 
'The American Dostoevsky' JOYCE CAROL OATES 
'One of the great American writers of our time' LOS ANGELES TIMES 
'Fierce, brave, funny, scatological, beautiful, convoluted and paranoid' STEPHEN KING 
'One of the most original and daring writers alive' INDEPENDENT 
 
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...

A vivid, enthralling read... James Ellroy is the outstanding American crime writer of his generation

Recent novels by the likes of Carl Hiassen, Andrew Vachss and George V Higgins have at best been treading water. James Ellroy may be the exception. He seems in less danger of burnout than of going supernova

White Jazz makes previous detective fiction read like Dr. Seuss

Riffling, rolling, reeling . . . Ellroy's best

Riveting . . . Impossible to put down . . . An author who breaks all the rules. He's a kamikaze pilot on a collision course with hell. The pen moves madly across the page . . . A book that is one long scream of rage and emptiness and longing

James Ellroy is a genius: the finest American crime writer since Raymond Chandler, and one of the most readable experimental writers in the world

Without him and his crime fiction, there's no David Peace or The Sopranos or Ian Rankin or The Wire or the work of countless writers and film makers who saw a different way of doing things when they first cracked the spine on an Ellroy

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.

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.

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.

Classic Noir

LA Confidential

Ellroy's back with the third of his LA Quartet!

'The king of macho noir' GUARDIAN 
'The American Dostoevsky' JOYCE CAROL OATES 
'One of the great American writers of our time' LOS ANGELES TIMES 
'Fierce, brave, funny, scatological, beautiful, convoluted and paranoid' STEPHEN KING 
'One of the most original and daring writers alive' INDEPENDENT 
 
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.

Ellroy writes as if driven by demons. His brutal, staccato graffiti tips over into art

No emotion is spared; the writing is sparse, the plotting controlled. Not for the faint of heart, this is a big, powerful crime novel and possibly the first important example of the genre in the 1990s

Empty of any unessentials and full of wise-cracking wit

The Big Nowhere

A startling panorama of Los Angeles in the fifties.

'The king of macho noir' GUARDIAN 
'The American Dostoevsky' JOYCE CAROL OATES 
'One of the great American writers of our time' LOS ANGELES TIMES 
'Fierce, brave, funny, scatological, beautiful, convoluted and paranoid' STEPHEN KING 
'One of the most original and daring writers alive' INDEPENDENT 
 
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."

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 first book in the classic L.A. Quartet crime series

The Black Dahlia

A neo-noir crime novel from the legendary crime novelist James Ellroy.

'The king of macho noir' GUARDIAN 
'The American Dostoevsky' JOYCE CAROL OATES 
'One of the great American writers of our time' LOS ANGELES TIMES 
'Fierce, brave, funny, scatological, beautiful, convoluted and paranoid' STEPHEN KING 
'One of the most original and daring writers alive' INDEPENDENT 
 
Los Angeles, 15th January 1947. A beautiful young woman walks into the night and meets a horrific destiny. 
 
Five days later, her tortured body is found drained of blood and cut in half. The newspapers call her 'The Black Dahlia'. For two cops, what begins as an investigation becomes a hellish journey that takes them to the core of the dead girl's twisted life.

A mesmerising study of the psycho-sexual obsession . . . extraordinarily well written

One of those rare, brilliantly written books you want to press on other people

A wonderful tale of ambition, insanity, passion and deceit

The outstanding crime writer of his generation

My Pursuit of Women

The Hilliker Curse

A raw, explicit memoir as high-intensity and riveting as any of Ellroy's novels. The theme: the author's obsessive pursuit of women.

We turn the pages gripped with a rubbernecker's fascination ... It is ugly, beautiful, reprehensible and moving. In other words, a hard book to forget

High-octane ... A breathless piece of writing ... When it comes to pinning down the most startling possible word collision, Ellroy's acrobatic pizzazz is beyond doubt ... This is literary knife-throwing at its most exhilarating and dangerous

A painfully honest book, written in Ellroy's usual blunt, breathless but often starkly beautiful prose ... a marvellous read, sly, self-mocking and filled with troubling insight

James Ellroy's crime novels have been much acclaimed for their dark plots, tough prose and generally bleak view of the world. Now that he's brought those same qualities to bear on a history of his relationships with women, the result, inevitably, is not for the faint-hearted ... Ellroy writes with such swagger and certainty that it's hard not to be swept along. He also - let's face it - has quite a tale to tell

The latest from this American literary legend is a stark rendition of murder, nervous breakdown, affairs, divorces and much more. It's an incredibly frank and soul-bearing piece of writing which goes some way to explaining the extreme and obsessive nature of Ellroy's brilliant novels

Riveting ... this is the most addictive of reads about life, love and self-discovery, in astonishing, soul-baring detail. An unforgettable autobiography

This latest book is Ellroy’s most intimate and personal . . . It’s forceful and unsparing in its revelations . . . [His sentences] make you grateful to read his prose, with its marvelous fury, passion and energy. They also compel you to keep rooting for him

Crime writer James Ellroy’s most compelling mystery story has always been his own . . . But "The Hilliker Curse" is not meant to be merely a confession. It is an act of creation . . . There’s a truth of feeling in it, too, an underlying sense of what it is actually like to live in the vortex of an impossible yearning . . . Ellroy is expert and relentless at dramatizing the effects [of his obsession]

As fascinating as it is at times utterly disturbing

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 cœur. 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.

My Dark Places

America's greatest crime writer investigates his mother's murder

The outstanding American crime writer of his generation

A gripping and quite awesome form of literature

A tour de force of confessional writing

Ellroy proves that he is more than just a crime writer, he is one of the best and most important writers in America today

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. His most recent novel, Blood's a Rover, completes the magisterial 'Underworld USA Trilogy' - the first two volumes of which (American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand) were both Sunday Times bestsellers.

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.

The Cold Six Thousand

The sequel to the international bestseller American Tabloid

The quality mark of The Cold Six Thousand is that it can give heavyweight punch to even that most worked-over image, the shooting of JFK ... Knockout

Richer and darker than ever, this story ... reminds us how far ahead of his peers Ellroy really is

The Cold Six Thousand is as brutal and honest an exposure of the American Dream as anyone could hope for

Astonishing ... not America corrupted, but America in its purest, uncut form

Ellroy is the author of some of the most powerful crime novels ever written

An explosive new novel from the modern master of noir

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.

James Ellroy

One of the great American writers of our time.

Fierce, brave, funny, scatological, beautiful, convoluted, and paranoid.

James Ellroy is the American Dostoyevsky.

James Ellroy is the neo-noir eminence of L.A. crime fiction.

Ellroy keeps things moving at breakneck speed at all times ... The trick to it is Ellroy's incomparable style; fast, punchy, telegrammatic prose that demands to be read quickly and that flows like an enraged river.

There has never been a writer like James Ellroy. . . . He has been making real a secret world behind the official history of America . . . and to enter it is to experience a vivid eyeball rush of recognition.

As lysergic, incantatory and forensic as anything he’s ever written

From bestselling author James Ellroy ('The neo-noir eminence of L.A. crime fiction' The New Yorker) a gritty, fast-paced historical crime thriller set in 1962 Los Angeles during the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 
 
'A mesmerising crime thriller full of corruption, cynicism and sleaze' FINANCIAL TIMES 
‘Fierce, brave, funny, scatological, beautiful, convoluted, and paranoid’ STEPHEN KING 
‘The American Dostoyevsky’ JOYCE CAROL OATES 
'As lysergic, incantatory and forensic as anything he’s ever written' IAN RANKIN 
 
It’s late October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just concluded. The Russkies blinked and pulled their ICBMs out of Cuba. Attorney General Robert Kennedy fears reprisals from seething commies. He orders a red probe and puts the LAPD on the job. 
 
Freddy Otash is injudiciously named the lead investigating officer. He’s a stone-cold criminal with police sanction and a harrowing dope habit. He homes in on a red-front trade union. There’s a murder on Halloween night. It may link to ex-VP and current gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon and two commie snuffs from eight years back. Freddy’s overworked and overamped. He’s running the probe, and Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman—Tricky Dick Nixon’s head goons—have hired him to keep Nixon away from the smear-minded press. 
 
L.A. is coming unglued. Ex-cop/lawyer Tom Bradley is running for a city council seat and pushing the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Playboy kingpin Hugh Hefner is along for the ride, out to exploit racial tension and peddle untold copies of his smut rag. 
 
Red Sheet is James Ellroy’s most crazed kamikaze run and a daring, subversive work of fiction.

James Ellroy

Books by James Ellroy

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L.A. Quartet

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