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

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 the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. He lives in Colorado.

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'.

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.

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.

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

James Ellroy

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

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.

The Enchanters

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Kate-Atkinson

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

prhuk-authors

Penguin Shop: 3 Clothbound Classics for £33

Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics

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'.

James Ellroy

Praise for The Enchanters

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books by James Ellroy

Series by James Ellroy

Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics168 Books

L.A. Quartet4 Books

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter