James Ellroy

Author

• Born: March 4, 1948
• Place of Birth: Los Angeles, California

Biography

Lee Earle Ellroy, better known as James Ellroy, was born March 4, 1948, in Los Angeles, California. His father, Armand Ellroy, was a jack of all trades who dabbled in accounting, among other jobs, but usually was unemployed. His mother, Geneva “Jean” Odelia Hilliker Ellroy was a registered nurse. By the time his parents divorced in 1954, they’d grown to hate one another, and Ellroy found himself siding with his father. His mother’s decision to move to El Monte, California, after the divorce did not improve his opinion of her. Though Ellroy told the judge he wanted to live with his father, the judge granted his mother temporary custody. In 1958, Ellroy’s mother was murdered; her killer was never found.

His mother’s murder, and the obsession that Ellroy developed about her death, caused his adolescence to be an unhappy one. Most of his early years were spent drunk or on drugs. He committed a number of petty crimes (shoplifting, voyeurism, breaking and entering) and spent some time in jail, which gave him ample time to obsess over his mother’s murder. He later wrote Clandestine (1982), a fictionalized account of his mother’s murder in which the killer is caught. In 1996, Ellroy revisited the death of his mother when he wrote My Dark Places, which chronicles his investigation into his mother’s death. Ellroy returned to the cold case once again in The Hilliker Curse (2010), in which he explores how his relationship to his mother and her death affected the course of his connections to women, especially his lovers and wives.

After his mother’s death, Ellroy lived with his father. Armand Ellroy liked to regale his son with tales of his adventures—and occasional misadventures—with famous people. When his father wasn’t telling him stories, the two would sit side by side on the couch, reading their own books. When Ellroy was seventeen, he enlisted in the Army and quickly found that it was not the right place for him. He spent the next few months convincing the Army to discharge him. Meanwhile, his father suffered three strokes and died. Shortly after his father’s death, the Army gave Ellroy an honorable discharge. Forced to survive on his own, Ellroy went back to stealing and started living in abandoned apartments. The police found him and arrested him. When he was released from jail, a friend’s father took pity on him and became his guardian. But, by the age of eighteen, Ellroy was back on the streets again, trying to make a life stealing, drinking, and doing drugs. After another stay in jail, Ellroy got a job at an adult bookstore.

After finally realizing that his life had taken an unhealthy turn, Ellroy joined Alcoholics Anonymous and turned his life around. He wrote his first novel, Brown’s Requiem, when he was thirty-two. It was published in 1981. Ellroy went on to write numerous novels, many of which became international bestsellers. He also wrote several nonfiction books, short-story collections, and contributed to many anthologies. Ellroy settled in Kansas City with his second wife, Helen Knode. The couple divorced in 2006, after fifteen years of marriage, and Ellroy returned to Southern California.

Ellroy's autobiographical connection to Los Angeles has informed many of his works, as has the broader sociopolitical atmosphere of the historical period in which the work is set. Ellroy is particularly known for shedding light on racial and ethnic fault lines, for the grittiness he has brought to the noir genre, and for mixing real-life personages with fictional characters of his own creation.

Of the two dozen books Ellroy has penned, he is perhaps most famous for his LA Quartet: The Black Dahlia (1987), based on a real-life 1947 cold case, The Big Nowhere (1988), LA Confidential (1990), and White Jazz (1992). L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia were both adapted for film in 1997 and 2006, respectively. Ellroy also wrote the Underworld U.S.A. series, covering the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Several well-known characters from Ellroy's previous novels appear in Perfidia (2014), about the murder of a Japanese American family in Los Angeles one day before the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Perfidia is the first of a planned quartet that takes place before the events of The Black Dahlia and covers World War II–related subjects such as the Japanese American internment.

Ellroy continued publishing through the late 2010s and early 2020s. In 2019, Ellroy published The Storm, continuing his famed LA Quartet series. Ellroy then began a new series, the Fred Otash novels. He published the first novel in the series, Widespread Panic, in 2021. Ellroy followed Widespread Panic with The Enchanters in 2023.

Bibliography

Austerlitz, Saul. "James Ellroy Returns Home." Atlantic. Atlantic Monthly Group, 11 Sept. 2014. Web. 5 Apr. 2016.

Ellroy, James. "A 'Lasciviously LA' Lunch with Crime Novelist James Ellroy." Interview by Arun Rath. All Things Considered. NPR, 14 Sept. 2014. Web. 6 Apr. 2016.

Harvey, Chris. "James Ellroy Interview for Perfidia: 'I Have a Penchant for the Extreme.'" Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 10 Sept. 2014. Web. 5 Apr. 2016.

"James Elroy: 'I'm Trying to Have a Strong Third Act. I'm in Competition with Philip Roth.'" The Guardian, 10 July 2022, www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jul/10/james-ellroy-alcoholics-anonymous-hollywood-death-trip-interview. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

Powell, Steven. James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction. New York: Macmillan, 2016. Print.

Powell, Steven, ed. Conversations with James Ellroy. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012. Print.