Christmas 1951, Los Angeles: a city where the police are as corrupt as the criminals. Six prisoners are beaten senseless in their cells by cops crazed on alcohol. For the three LAPD detectives involved, it will expose the guilty secrets on which they have built their corrupt and violent careers. The novel takes these cops on a sprawling epic of brutal violence and the murderous seedy side of Hollywood. One of the best crime novels ever written, it is the heart of Ellroy's four-novel masterpiece, the LA Quartet, and an example of crime writing at its most powerful.

From “one of the great American writers of our time” (Los Angeles Times Book Review): a raw, explicit memoir as high-intensity and riveting as any of his novels. The year was 1958. James Ellroy was ten years old. His mother, Jean Hilliker, had divorced her fast-buck hustler husband. She gave her son a choice: live with his father or her. He chose his father, and Jean—“half gassed”—attacked him. He wished her dead. Three months later, she was murdered. Ellroy writes, “I owe her for every true thing that I am. I must remove the malediction I have placed on her and on myself,” and in The Hilliker Curse, he narrates his quest for “atonement in women.” He unsparingly describes his shattered childhood, his delinquent teens, his writing life, his love affairs and marriages, a nervous breakdown and the beginning of a relationship with an extraordinary woman who may just be the long-sought Her. It is a layered narrative of time and place, emotion and insight, sexuality and spiritual quest. And all of it is reported with gut-wrenching and heart-rending candor. A brilliant and soul-baring revelation of self—and unlike any memoir you have ever read.

Set in Los Angeles from 1947 to 1959, Hollywood Nocturnes gives us an afterword and six stories set in the same crime-ridden, sex-crazed period of history of James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet novels (which include L.A. Confidential and The Big Nowhere).Dig this: the swinging sax man's doing repos and plotting a kidnapping-of himself; a tommy gun is ripping apart windows, curtains, and bodies in High Darktown; a carhop at Scrivner's is keeping two extremely sweet sugar daddies, Howard Hughes and mobster Mickey Cohen, happy-until the scene turns murderous.This is the hip-hop hard-edged world of L.A. 1950s style: cars with fins, Commies in closets, starmakers with come-ons, ex-cons with guns, and cops with mean streaks as wide as Sunset Strip.James Ellroy's bizarre, stark tales dazzle us with their unexpected humor, raw brutality, and slightly lighter-than-usual noir realism. Hollywood Nocturnes is quintessential Ellroy: bluesy, black, and very, very hot.

1950s Los Angeles: The City of Angels has become the city of the Angel of Death. Communist witch-hunts and insanely violent killings are terrorising the community. Three men are plunged into a maelstrom of violence and deceit when their lives become inextricably linked as each one confronts his own personal darkness. Told with Ellroy's characteristically forceful and relentless style, The Big Nowhere is the link between the Black Dahlia and LA Confidential in his masterwork, The LA Quartet. It is as powerful and thrilling as crime fiction gets.

The Shroud Shifter speaks: I clipped my self-sharpening, teflon-coated, brushed-steel axe and swung it at her neck. Her head was sheared cleanly off; blood burst from the cavity, her arms and legs twitched spastically, then her whole body crumpled to the floor. The force of my swing spun me around, and for one second my vision eclipsed the entire scene — blood spattered walls, the body shooting an arterial geyser out the neck, the heart still pumping in reflex... Martin Plunkett has struck again.

The 2005 edition of The Best American Crime Writing offers the year's most shocking, compelling, and gripping writing about real-life crime, including Peter Landesman's article about female sex slaves (the most requested and widely read New York Times story of 2004), a piece from The New Yorker by Stephen J. Dubner (the coauthor of Freakanomics) about a high-society silver thief, and an extraordinarily memorable "ode to bar fights" written by Jonathan Miles for Men's Journal after he punched an editor at a staff party. But this year's edition includes a bonus -- an original essay by James Ellroy detailing his fascination with Joseph Wambaugh and how it fed his obsession with crime -- even to the point of selling his own blood to buy Wambaugh's books. Smart, entertaining, and controversial, The Best American Crime Writing is an essential edition to any crime enthusiast's bookshelf.

Dig. The Demon Dog gets down with a new book of scenes from America’s capital of kink: Los Angeles. Fourteen pieces, some fiction, some nonfiction, all true enough to be admissible as state’s evidence, and half of it in print for the first time. And every one of them bearing the James Ellroy brand of mayhem, machismo, and hollow-nose prose. Here are Mexican featherweights and unsolved-murder vics, crooked cops and a very clean D.A. Here is a profile of Hollywood’s latest celebrity perp-walker, Robert Blake, and three new novellas featuring a demented detective with an obsession with a Hollywood actress. And, oh yes, just maybe the last appearance of Hush-Hush sleaze-monger Danny Getchell. Here’s Ellroy himself, shining a 500-watt Mag light into all the dark places of his life and imagination. Destination: Morgue! puts the reader’s attention in a hammerlock and refuses to let go. From the Trade Paperback edition.

In James Ellroy’s first novel, a PI investigates a deadly conspiracy at one of Los Angeles’s most exclusive country clubs It would be a stretch to call Fritz Brown a detective. A PI in name only, he washed out of the police force at twenty-five, and makes a cash living doing under-the-table repo work for a sleazy used-car dealer. It’s an ugly job, but Fritz is not one to say no to easy money. That doesn’t mean he won’t take a case now and then. A caddy visits his office, asking Fritz to dig up dirt on the golf-nut who’s dating his sister. Convinced by the caddy’s suspiciously fat wad of bills, Fritz agrees to investigate, hoping for a chance to meet the girl. Instead he finds himself embroiled in a tangled world of country club intrigue, where wealth can buy innocence and murder is not half as rare as a hole-in-one.

From the modern master of noir comes a novel about the malevolent monarch of the 1950s Hollywood underground—a tale of pervasive paranoia teeming with communist conspiracies, FBI finks, celebrity smut films, and strange bedfellows.Freddy Otash was the man in the know and the man to know in ‘50s L.A. He was a rogue cop, a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp—and, most notably, the head strong-arm goon for Confidential magazine.  Confidential presaged the idiot internet—and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink, and the scurrilous skank. It mauled misanthropic movie stars, sex-soiled socialites, and putzo politicians. Mattress Jack Kennedy, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson—Frantic Freddy outed them all. He was the Tattle Tyrant who held Hollywood hostage, and now he’s here to...

Dig. The Demon Dog gets down with a new book of scenes from America's capital of kink: Los Angeles. Fourteen pieces, some fiction, some nonfiction, all true enough to be admissible as state's evidence, and half of it in print for the first time. And every one of them bearing the James Ellroy brand of mayhem, machismo, and hollow-nose prose. Here are Mexican featherweights and unsolved-murder vics, crooked cops and a very clean D.A. Here is a profile of Hollywood's latest celebrity perp-walker, Robert Blake, and three new novellas featuring a demented detective with an obsession with a Hollywood actress. And, oh yes, just maybe the last appearance of Hush-Hush sleaze-monger Danny Getchell. Here's Ellroy himself, shining a 500-watt Mag light into all the dark places of his life and imagination. Destination: Morgue! puts the reader's attention in a hammerlock and refuses to let go.From the Trade Paperback edition.

In the introduction to L.A. Noir, a collection of three contemporary cop thrillers originally published in the early '80s, James Ellroy confesses his desire to match the suspense and terror of Thomas Harris's groundbreaking novel Red Dragon and to create a detective as compelling and as complex as Harris's Will Graham. His attempts to fulfill that desire introduce readers to Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins, a brilliantly flawed hero of sorts whom Ellroy describes as his "antidote to the sensitive candy-assed philosophizing private eye." Written before Hannibal Lecter made his first appearance in print, before serial killer fiction had become a subgenre, Blood on the Moon, the first novel of the L.A. Noir trilogy, pits the racist, reactionary, sexually obsessed Hopkins against a sexually motivated serial killer whose intelligence and capacity for brutality match the detective's own. In Because the Night, the second book in the trilogy, Hopkins once again confronts psychotic evil, this time while investigating the possible connection between a multiple homicide and the disappearance of a fellow cop. The trilogy concludes with Suicide Hill, a manhunt-thriller in which Hopkins tracks down a kidnapper and discovers among his colleagues a complex web of power, corruption, and lies. Suspenseful, stark, and startling, the novels of the L.A. Noir trilogy exhibit the seminal hallmarks of Ellroy's taut, haunting prose. His dark and disturbing portrait of Hopkins, a thoroughly unlikable protagonist, drives the novels with unrelenting force, taking readers down paths of they might not really want to explore. Readers seeking a protagonist they can identify with, a hero they can like, probably won't find much to recommend in L.A. Noir, but Ellroy never meant Hopkins to be a likable hero. Instead, he has created what he calls "a complex monument to a basically shitty guy," and in doing so he laid the groundwork for the novels that have earned him a seat at the table of truly great crime novelists. In all, L.A. Noir offers Ellroy's admirers a chance to look back a few years and see the primitive intimations of the style and substance that would later characterize his L.A. Quartet series, but it is no primer for beginners, who might be more readily wooed by the more refined tension and complexity of his later novels. --L.A. Smith

James Ellroy and Otto Penzler mined the past century to find this treasure trove of thirty-nine stories. From noir's twenties-era infancy come gems like James M. Cain's "Pastorale," and its postwar heyday boasts giants like Mickey Spillane and Evan Hunter. Packing an undeniable punch, diverse contemporary incarnations include Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, Dennis Lehane, and William Gay, with many page-turners appearing from the past decade.

James Ellroy, the undisputed master of crime writing, has teamed up with the Los Angeles Police Museum to present a stunning text on 1953 LA. While combing the museum's photo archives, Ellroy discovered that the year featured a wide array of stark and unusual imagery—and he has written 25,000 words that illuminate the crimes and law enforcement of the era. Ellroy offers context and layers on wild and rich atmosphere—this is the cauldron that was police work in the city of the tarnished angels more than six decades ago. More than 80 duotone photos are spread throughout the book in the manner of hard-edged police evidence.

The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz, American Tabloid... James Ellroy's high-velocity, best-selling novels have redefined noir for our age, propelling us within inches of the dark realities of America's recent history. Now, in The Cold Six Thousand, his most ambitious and explosive novel yet, he puts the whole of the 1960s under his blistering lens. The result is a work of fierce, epic fiction, a speedball through our most tumultuous time.It begins in Dallas. November 22, 1963. The heart of the American Dream detonated.Wayne Tedrow Jr., a young Vegas cop, arrives with a loathsome job to do. He's got $6,000 in cash and no idea that he is about to plunge into the cover-up conspiracy already brewing around Kennedy's assassination, no idea that this will mark the beginning of a hellish five-year ride through the private underbelly of public policy.Ellroy's furiously paced narrative tracks...