Astonishing . . . original, daring, brilliant.
--Philadelphia Inquirer
In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself.
In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten--and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.
"Ellroy is more powerful than ever."
--The Nation

We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination—in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C....

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 the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty...

Where three renegade law-enforcement officers—a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents—are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history....

James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open.

Chosen by Time magazine as one of the ten best books of the year.

"Hard-bitten ... ingenious ... Ellroy segues into political intrigue without missing a beat." — The New York Times

"Vastly entertaining." — Los Angeles Times

"One hellishly exciting ride." — Detroit Free Press

"A supremely controlled work of art." — The New York Times Book Review

Los Angeles, 1950 Red crosscurrents: the Commie Scare and a string of brutal mutilation killings. Gangland intrigue and Hollywood sleaze. Three cops caught in a hellish 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. He's 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 postwar Europe. Buzz Meeks-bagman, ex-Narco goon, and pimp for Howard Hughes-is fighting communism for the money. All three men have purchased tickets to a nightmare.

Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns--it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. 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.
Klein tells his own story--his voice clipped, sharp, often as brutal as the events he's describing--taking us with him on a journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, avarice, and perversion. It's a world he created, but now he'll do anything to get out of it alive.
Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor edge, White Jazz is crime fiction at its most shattering.

(From the Catalog-Movie)
Los Angeles, 1953: six innocent people gunned down at an all-night diner. Three policemen arrive to investigate: Ed Exley, goaded by his father's success on the force, burning to eclipse him; Bud White, witness to his mother's murder, a time bomb with a badge; and Jack Vincennes, former addict, a shake-down artist who works celebrities. Worse yet, these three see themselves as rivals. Their own rage mirrors that of the killers they seek, all players in a game without rules or survivors.
"James Ellroy is a fictional sculptor who carves a universe without beauty, laughter or remorse. L.A. CONFIDENTIAL is his finest work yet." (People)

On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a Los Angeles vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia-and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history.Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and rivals in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia-driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl's twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches-into a region of total madness.

黑色小說之王詹姆士‧艾洛伊傳世系列、「洛城四部曲」之四
這個城市本不是這樣，這人原來也不是這樣
或許是爵士，或許是這時代的聲音
無色無形卻深深影響了他們
洛杉磯，一九五八年。
這年代若還有什麼可以百分之百確定的，就是大維．克連是個壞透了的壞蛋。然而，他同時也是洛城警局副隊長、廉價租屋房東、催帳人、為黑道出力的合法殺手。在洛城社會的黑暗秩序中，他雖稱不上橫行霸道，卻也自成一股惡勢力。
只不過這次長官給他的任務是要他當誘餌－－「一個引蛇出洞的壞警察」，去引出來自四面八方的牛鬼蛇神，這批人包括：地方政客、警局高層、黑道勢力，以及大毒梟－－每一個都拼了命想隱瞞自己的祕密。對「四十二歲就已經槁木死灰」的克連而言，他只認為這是報應的時刻來臨了。
在這一片污黑混濁的黑白勢力中，大維，這名沒血沒淚的惡漢警探卻遇見那唯一可能扭轉他命運的亮光－－女明星葛蘭黛。然而，這一抹亮點卻是航空鉅子霍華．休斯的禁臠，並且還在黑幫角頭的覬覦之下，即將陷入謀殺醜聞。況且眼下的局勢是，高層為了爭奪查維斯溪谷，在「更新」墨西哥社區改建棒球場議案上鬥法弄權，還宣布要剷除地方警力的腐敗份子，要對惡質警員展開全面調查。頭一個就躲不過的大維．克連顧不得保全自己，他只想保護葛蘭黛，不過他簡直是讓自己成為黑白兩道的靶心，他已經亂了套，行事離了譜，賄賂、勒索、恐嚇、買通，一切都不成章法……
作者讓惡德警官克連道出自己的故事－－他的聲音簡潔犀利，拔高尖刺一如薩克斯風的悲鳴，殘酷冷血一如他所敘述的事件；藉著他的眼睛帶領我們見識一個由巨大的野心、貪慾和偏執所塑造的世界。那是他的世界，是他為了活命願意不計一切脫離的世界。