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Fiction

• Brown’s Requiem (1981)
• Clandestine (1982)
• Blood on the Moon (1984)
• Because the Night (1984)
• Suicide Hill (1986)
• the L.A. Quartet:
• The Black Dahlia (1987)
• The Big Nowhere (1988)
• L.A. Confidential (1990)
• White Jazz (1992)
• Hollywood Nocturnes (1994)
• American Tabloid (1995)
• L.A. Noir (1998) [reprint of three earlier novels: Blood on the Moon, Because the Night, Suicide Hill]
• Crimewave: Reportage and Fiction from the Underside of L.A. (1999)

Nonfiction

• My Dark Places (1996)

L.A. Noir (1998) collects three of Ellroy’s early novels featuring Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins of the Los Angeles police department. In his introduction to L.A. Noir, Ellroy says that when he wrote Blood on the Moon, he “wanted to write a contemporarily set, contrapunctually structured novel about a sex obsessed cop tracking down a sexually motivated killer…Hopkins was my antidote to the sensitive candy-assed philosophizing private eye. I wanted to create a recognizably racist and reactionary cop and make his racism and reactionary tendencies casual attributes rather than defining characteristics…and I didn’t care whether my readers liked Lloyd Hopkins—as long as they liked the books he was in.”

“I wrote Blood on the Moon,” Ellroy continues in the introduction to L.A. Noir. “I read Red Dragon and realized it was a far superior book.” Red Dragon by Thomas Harris introduces Harris’s famous character, Dr. Hannibal Lector, but focuses more on Will Graham, the man able to project himself into the mind of a psychopathic killer and thereby help to catch him. After reading Red Dragon, Ellroy “wanted another shot at making Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins as great a character as Thomas Harris’s Will Graham.” Ellroy then wrote two more Lloyd Hopkins novels: Because the Night and Suicide Hill.

I came to Ellroy’s earlier novels to see how they compare with his later postmodern exposé, L.A. Confidential. The setting, Los Angeles, is the same, as are the themes of human depravity, violence, political and social corruption, and a nightmare vision of the city. But Ellroy’s style in the earlier novels is conventional, with complete sentences and straightforward, linear narrative structure, with an occasional flashback.

L.A.Confidential (1990)
Warner Books, 496 pages,  $12.99 trade paperback, ISBN  0-446-67424-9, Books on Tape 2828

Los Angeles in the 1950s: movie stars, fabulous mansions, a city awash in dangerous passions, political corruption, personal vengeance, and human blood. A mass murder at a small café brings together three L.A. cops, each with his own personal history: Ed Exley, determined to outshine his policeman father and martyred policeman brother; Bud White, who witnessed his own mother’s murder and now uses his badge to try to avenge it; and Jack Vincennes, who shakes down movie stars for a scandal magazine and police show.

A series of discrete scenes. Overlapping characters. Seemingly unrelated actions. Only well into the book do the separate pieces of the story begin to fall into place as Ellroy underscores his vision of L.A. society with a particularly postmodern narrative structure that demands a lot from the reader. A staccato writing style contributes to the scenic, episodic feel:

Both crime scenes sealed—the printshop, the pad  next door. One Marin sheriff—a fat guy named Hatcher. A lab man talking nonstop.

Crime Scene 1: the back room at Rapid Bob's Printing. Bud scoped Dudley nonstop, flashing back to  his pitch: "We thought you were going to kill him, so we stopped you. I'm sorry if we were untoward, but you were a handful. Hinton is associated with some very bad people, and I'll elaborate in all due time."

He didn't press it—Dud might have stuff on him.

Lynn in custody.

Exley's slap in the face.

 (365)

Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential is postmodern American fiction at its most powerful.

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