The Black Dahlia

On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia, and her murder sparks the greatest manhunt in California history.

Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and adversaries in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia - driven by dark needs to know everything about her life, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of post-war Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl's twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches - into a region of total madness. (1987)

The Big Nowhere

Los Angeles, 1950. Red crosscurrents: the Commie Scare and a string of brutal mutilation killings. Movieland leftist on a collision course with a grand jury investigating team. Gangsters and cops and fixers and Hollywood grotesques in a noir novel of epic scope and depth.

The Big Nowhere is the story of three men caught in a massive web of ambition, perversion, and deceit. 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, 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 postware Europe. Buzz Meeks - bagman, ex-Narco goon, and pimp for Howard Hughes - is fighting communism for the money.

All three have purchased tickets to a nightmare... (1988)

Three cops in a spiral, a nightmare that tests loyalty and courage, a nightmare that offers no mercy, allows for no survivors. Here is James Ellroy's masterpiece...darkness to haunt you in shades of red, gray, and black. (1988)

So it's pay-up time for Klein. Big time. He plunges into a nightmare world of greed, blood, fists, and twisted sin. A monsterous world he created. But now the monster has turned on its creator.

Blood on the Moon

One is an L.A. cop. Hard, driven, brilliant. The one they call when a murder case looks bad.

The other is a sex killer. The kind who never leaves a clue, never gets caught, and never runs out of ways to make pretty girls die.

The cop is supposed to play by the book. But not the killer...And the beautiful, terrified woman caught between them isn't ready for the final moves. (1984)

Suicide Hill

In disgrace after a badly handled arrest in New Orleans, Sgt. Lloyd Hopkins is assigned as liaison officer to an FBI investigation of a series of diabolically clever bank robberies. Three men have been keeping tabs on bank managers who are having extramarital affairs, and kidnapping their girlfriends - forcing the managers to open their banks early...

Hopkins' uncanny insight into the criminal mind bears fruit after a violent episode with the robbers, leaving him with information he would just as soon not have -information about police corruption that leads straight into the offices of his sworn enemy Fred Gaffaney, head of the Internal Affairs Division.

Ridding the L.A.P.D of Hopkins has always been Gaffaney's goal. But with the information Hopkins has uncovered, Gaffaney's career - and his very life - are in deadly jeopardy. (1984)

Hollywood Nocturnes

An alternative Ellroy universe, etched less in blood and more in elegiac neon. Ellroy's entire short story oeuvre, and a few surprises, including a Buzz Meeks reprise "Since I Don't Have You."

Kats and kittens, chicks and charlies: this is prime-time Ellroy.

American Tabloid

A bastard son of the L.A. Quartet, American Tabloid spawns its sleaze to an international level: we are behind and below the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination...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 three renegade law enforcement officers - a former LA cop and 2 FBI agents - are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full blast shotgun into history...

Fallen Angels: Six Noir Tales Told for Television edited by James Ellroy

This is an unusual anthology. It contains six hard-to-find stories by six masters of noir and the teleplays for their film adaptations. James Ellroy's sizzling preface presents an invigorating synopsis of the hard-boiled genre and its "hot to exploit the apocalypse" practitioners, while the stories, by Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, William Campbell Gault, Cornell Woolrich, Jonathan Craig, and Ellroy at the top of their forms, are riveting: tough, edgy, cynical, moody, and poisonous.

Crime Wave

L.A.: Come on vacation; go home on probation. In no other city do sex, celebrity, money, and crime exert such an irresistible magnetic field. And no writer has mapped that field with greater savagery and savvy than James Ellroy. With this fever-hot collection of reportage and short fiction, the author of L.A. Confidential return to his native habitat and portrays it as a smog-shrouded netherworld where "every third person is a peeper, prowler, pederast, prostitute, pillhead, pothead or pimp."

From the 1950s scandal sheets to this morning's police blotter, and from his mother's unsolved murder to the slaying of Nichole Brown Simpson, Ellroy investigates true crimes and restores humanity to their victims. He also enlists the forgotten luminaries of a vanished Hollywood in two baroquely twisted novellas of slaughter, smut-mongering, and corruption. Shocking, mesmerizing, and written in prose as wounding as an ice pick. Crime Wave is Ellroy at his most majestically excessive.