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Sherlock Holmes, pipe-puffing hero of crime fiction, confers with his colleague Dr. Watson; together these characters popularized the genre.

Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalises crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred. It has several sub-genres, including detective fiction (such as the whodunnit), legal thriller, courtroom drama and hard-boiled fiction.

History of crime fictions[link]

While the archetype for a murder mystery dates back to "The Three Apples" in the One Thousand and One Nights,^[1] crime fiction began to be considered as a serious genre only around 1900. The earliest known crime novel is "The Rector of Veilbye" by the Danish author Steen Steensen Blicher, published in 1829. Better known are the earlier dark works of Edgar Allan Poe (e.g., "The Murders in the Rue Morgue " (1841), " The Mystery of Marie Roget " (1842), and "The Purloined Letter" (1844). Wilkie Collins' epistolary novel The Woman in White was published in 1860, while The Moonstone (1868) is often thought to be his masterpiece. French author Émile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq (1868) laid the groundwork for the methodical, scientifically minded detective. The evolution of locked room mysteries was one of the landmarks in the history of crime fiction. The Sherlock Holmes mysteries of Arthur Conan Doyle are said to have been singularly responsible for the huge popularity in this genre. A precursor was Paul Féval, whose series Les Habits Noirs (1862–67) features Scotland Yard detectives and criminal conspiracies.

The evolution of the print mass media in the United Kingdom and the United States in the latter half of the 19th century was crucial in popularising crime fiction and related genres. Literary 'variety' magazines like Strand, McClure's, and Harper's quickly became central to the overall structure and function of popular fiction in society, providing a mass-produced medium that offered cheap, illustrated publications that were essentially disposable.

Like the works of many other important fiction writers of his day—e.g. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens—Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared in serial form in the monthly Strand magazine in the United Kingdom. The series quickly attracted a wide and passionate following on both sides of the Atlantic, and when Doyle killed off Holmes in The Final Problem, the public outcry was so great, and the publishing offers for more stories so attractive, that he was reluctantly forced to resurrect him.

Later a set of stereotypic formulae began to appear to cater to various tastes.

Categories of crime fiction[link]

Crime fiction can be divided into the following branches:

Detective fiction[link]

• The whodunit: The most common form of detective fiction. It features a complex, plot-driven story in which the reader is provided with clues from which the identity of the perpetrator of the crime may be deduced before the solution is revealed at the end of the book.
• Locked room mystery: A specialized kind of a whodunit in which the crime is committed under apparently impossible circumstances, such as a locked room in which no intruder could have entered or left.
• Cozy: A subgenre of detective fiction in which sex, profanity or violence are downplayed or treated humorously.

Later and contemporary contributions to the whodunit[link]

• The historical whodunnit: Also a sub-genre of historical fiction. The setting of the story and the crime has some historical significance
• The inverted detective story: Also known as "howcatchem", the commission of the crime and the identity of the perpetrator is revealed to the reader first, then the rest of the story describes the detective's attempt to solve the mystery.
• The American hard-boiled school: Distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex, the sleuth usually also confronts danger and engages in violence.
• The police procedural: The detective is a member of the police, and thus the activities of a police force are usually convincingly depicted.
• The legal thriller: The major characters are instead lawyers and their employees, and they become involved in proving their cases.
• The spy novel: The major characters are instead spies, usually working for an intelligence agency.
• Caper stories and the criminal novel: Stories told from the point of view of the criminals.
• The psychological suspense: This specific sub-genre of the thriller genre also incorporates elements from detective fiction, as the protagonist must solve the mystery of the psychological conflict presented in these types of stories.
• Spoofs and parodies

Crime fiction and mainstream fiction[link]

When trying to pigeon-hole fiction, it is extraordinarily difficult to tell where crime fiction starts and where it ends. This is largely attributed to the fact that love, danger and death are central motifs in fiction. A less obvious reason is that the classification of a work may very well be related to the author's reputation.

For example, William Somerset Maugham's (1874–1966) novella Up at the Villa (1941) could very well be classified as crime fiction. This short novel revolves around a woman having a one-night stand with a total stranger who suddenly and unexpectedly commits suicide in her bedroom, and the woman's attempts at disposing of the body so as not to cause a scandal about herself or be suspected of killing the man. As Maugham is not usually rated as a writer of crime novels, Up at the Villa is hardly ever considered to be a crime novel and accordingly can be found in bookshops among his other, "mainstream" novels.

A more recent example is Bret Easton Ellis's (born 1964) seminal novel American Psycho (1991) about the double life of Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street yuppie and serial killer in the New York of the 1980s. Even though in American Psycho the most heinous crimes are depicted in minute detail, the novel has never been labelled a "crime novel", maybe because it is never explicitly mentioned whether Bateman actually commits the crimes or rather just fantasizes about them.

On the other hand, U.S. author James M. Cain is normally seen as a writer belonging to the "hard-boiled" school of crime fiction. However, his novel Mildred Pierce (1941) is really about the rise to success of an ordinary housewife developing her entrepreneurial skills and—legally—outsmarting her business rivals, and the domestic trouble caused by her success, with, in turn, her husband, her daughter and her lover turning against her. Although no crime is committed anywhere in the book, the novel was reprinted in 1989 by Random House, alongside Cain's thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), under the heading "Vintage Crime".

When film director Michael Curtiz adapted Mildred Pierce for the big screen in 1945, he lived up to the cinemagoers' and the producers' expectations by adding a murder that is not in the novel. As potential cinemagoers had been associating Cain with hard-boiled crime fiction only, this trick—exploited in advertisements and trailers—in combination with the casting of then Hollywood star Joan Crawford in the title role made sure that the film was going to be a box office hit even before it was released.

Seen from a practical point of view, one could argue that a crime novel is simply a novel that can be found in a bookshop on the shelf or shelves labelled "Crime". (This suggestion has actually been made about science fiction, but it can be applied here as well.) Penguin Books have had a long-standing tradition of publishing crime novels in paperback editions with green covers and spines (as opposed to the orange spines of mainstream literature), thus attracting the eyes of potential buyers already when they enter the shop. But again, this clever marketing strategy does not tell casual browsers what they are really in for when they buy a particular book.

"High art" versus "popular art"[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

The discrepancy between taste and acclaim[link]

Up to the 1960s or so, reading the paperback edition of a crime novel was usually considered a cheap thrill — with the word "cheap" used in both meanings: "inexpensive" and "of minor quality". The educated and civilized world was often interested, at least ostensibly, in the "high art" categorised by classical music, paintings by renowned artists, famous literature and plays like those of William Shakespeare. The term "popular art" referred to folk music, jazz, or rock 'n' roll, photography, the design of everyday objects, comics, science fiction, detective stories or erotic fiction (the latter circulating in private prints only to beat the censor), to quote a few examples. The idea of a "main stream" of literary output suggested that any book deviating, in either content or form or both, from the established norm of "high art" was "cheap", and anyone interested in popular culture was uneducated and unsophisticated and most probably originated in a lower socio-economic division of the contextual society. The universities and the other institutions of higher learning also looked down on artists producing "popular art" and categorically refused to critically assess it.

This often did not correlate with the immense popularity of popular art on both sides of the Atlantic, sometimes due to sensationalism. For example, the British had been fascinated by Edgar Wallace's (1875–1932) crime novels ever since the author set up a competition offering a reward to any reader who could figure out and describe just how the murder in his first book, The Four Just Men (1906), was committed.

A reassessment of critical ideals[link]

In the long run, the vast output of popular fiction could no longer be ignored, and literary critics — gradually, carefully and tentatively — started questioning and assessing the complete notion of the perceived gap between "high art" (or "serious literature") and "popular art" (in America often referred to as "pulp fiction", often verging on "smut and filth"). One of the first scholars to do so was American critic Leslie Fiedler. In his book Cross the Border — Close the Gap (1972), he advocates a thorough re-assessment of science fiction, the western, pornographic literature and all the other subgenres that previously had not been considered as "high art", and their inclusion in the literary canon:

The notion of one art for the 'cultural,' i.e., the favored few in any given society and of another subart for the 'uncultured,' i.e., an excluded majority as deficient in Gutenberg skills as they are untutored in 'taste,' in fact represents the last survival in mass industrial societies (capitalist, socialist, communist — it makes no difference in this regard) of an invidious distinction proper only to a class-structured community. Precisely because it carries on, as it has carried on ever since the middle of the eighteenth century, a war against that anachronistic survival, Pop Art is, whatever its overt politics, subversive: a threat to all hierarchies insofar as it is hostile to order and ordering in its own realm. What the final intrusion of Pop into the citadels of High Art provides, therefore, for the critic is the exhilarating new possibility of making judgments about the 'goodness' and 'badness' of art quite separated from distinctions between 'high' and 'low' with their concealed class bias.

In other words, it was now up to the literary critics to devise criteria with which they would then be able to assess any new literature along the lines of "good" or "bad" rather than "high" versus "popular".

Accordingly,

• A conventionally written and dull novel about, say, a "fallen woman" could be ranked lower than a terrifying vision of the future full of action and suspense.
• A story about industrial relations in the United Kingdom in the early 20th century — a novel about shocking working conditions, trade unionists, strikers and scabs — need not be more acceptable subject-matter per se than a well-crafted and fast-paced thriller about modern life.

But, according to Fiedler, it was also up to the critics to reassess already existing literature. In the case of U.S. crime fiction, writers that so far had been regarded as the authors of nothing but "pulp fiction" — Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and others — were gradually seen in a new light. Today, Chandler's creation, private eye Philip Marlowe — who appears, for example, in his novels The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940) — has achieved cult status and has also been made the topic of literary seminars at universities round the world, whereas on first publication Chandler's novels were seen as little more than cheap entertainment for the uneducated masses.

Nonetheless, "murder stories" such as Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment or Shakespeare's Macbeth are not dependent on their honorary membership in this genre for their acclaim.

Pseudonymous authors[link]

As far as the history of crime fiction is concerned, some authors have been reluctant to publish their crime novels under their real names. More currently, some publish pseudonymously because of the belief that since the large booksellers are aware of their historical sales figures, and command a certain degree of influence over publishers, the only way to "break out" of their current advance numbers is to publish as someone with no track record.

In the late 1930s and 40s, British County Court judge Arthur Alexander Gordon Clark (1900–1958) published a number of detective novels under the alias Cyril Hare in which he made use of his profoundly extensive knowledge of the English legal system. In Tragedy at Law (1942). Scottish journalist Leopold Horace Ognall (1908–1979) authored over ninety novels as Hartley Howard and Harry Carmichael. When he was still young and unknown, award-winning British novelist Julian Barnes (born 1946) published some crime novels under the alias Dan Kavanagh. Other authors take delight in cherishing their alter egos: Ruth Rendell (born 1930) writes one sort of crime novels as Ruth Rendell and another type as Barbara Vine; John Dickson Carr also used the pseudonym Carter Dickson. The author Evan Hunter (which itself was a pseudonym) wrote his crime fiction under the name of Ed McBain.

Film and literature: The case of crime fiction[link]

Crime fiction and the motion picture industry have complemented each other well over the years. Both cater to the need of the average audience to escape into an idealist world, where the good reaps the rewards, and the bad incur their punishment. Adaptations of crime fiction into films have been hugely successful.

For a detailed explication of the history of the relationship between crime fiction and the film industry, see the main article crime film and mystery film.

Crime fiction has also expanded to the world of videogames, an example being the Ace Attorney series, in which players investigate a murder in order to prove a suspect innocent and find the true culprit.

Availability of crime novels[link]

Quality and availability[link]

As with any other entity, quality of a crime fiction book is not in any meaningful proportion to its availability. Some of the crime novels generally regarded as the finest, including those regularly chosen by experts as belonging to the best 100 crime novels ever written (see bibliography), have been out of print ever since their first publication, which often dates back to the 1920s or 30s. The bulk of books that can be found today on the shelves labelled "Crime" consists of recent first publications usually no older than a few years.

Classics and bestsellers[link]

Furthermore, only a select few authors have achieved the status of "classics" for their published works. A classic is any text that can be received and accepted universally, because they transcend context. A popular, well known example is Agatha Christie, whose texts, originally published between 1920 and her death in 1976, are available in UK and US editions in all English speaking nations. Christie's works, particularly featuring detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple, have given her the title the 'Queen of Crime' and made her one of the most important and innovative writers in the development of the genre. Her most famous novels include Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death on the Nile (1937), and the world's best-selling mystery And Then There Were None (1939).^[2]

Other less successful, contemporary authors who are still writing have seen reprints of their earlier works, due to current overwhelming popularity of crime fiction texts among audiences (One only has to look at the amount of crime related television series to observe the astonishing popularity). One example is Val McDermid, whose first book appeared as far back as 1987; another is Florida-based author Carl Hiaasen, who has been publishing books since 1981, all of which are readily available.

Forgotten classics[link]

On the other hand, English crime writer Edgar Wallace, who was immensely popular with the English readership during the early decades of the 20th century (and who achieved fame in German-speaking countries due to the many B movies made in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s that were based on his novels), had almost been forgotten in his home country until House of Stratus eventually started republishing many of his 170 books around the turn of the millennium. Similarly, the books by the equally successful American author Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970), creator of the lawyer Perry Mason, which have frequently been adapted for film, radio, and TV, were only recently republished in the United Kingdom — books such as The Case of the Stuttering Bishop (1937), The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister (1953), etc.

Even television adaptations are not enough to save some authors. Gladys Mitchell rivalled Agatha Christie for UK sales in the 1930s and 1940s but only one of her 66 novels remains in print despite a BBC television series of the The Mrs Bradley Mysteries in 1999.

Revival of past classics[link]

From time to time publishing houses decide, for commercial purposes, to revive long-forgotten authors and reprint one or two of their more commercially successful novels. Apart from Penguin Books, who for this purpose have resorted to their old green cover and dug out some of their vintage authors, Pan started a series in 1999 entitled "Pan Classic Crime," which includes a handful of novels by Eric Ambler, but also American Hillary Waugh's Last Seen Wearing .... In 2000, Edinburgh-based Canongate Books started a series called "Canongate Crime Classics," in which they published John Franklin Bardin's The Deadly Percheron (1946) — both a whodunnit and a roman noir about amnesia and insanity — and other novels. However, books brought out by smaller publishers like Canongate Books are usually not stocked by the larger bookshops and overseas booksellers.

Sometimes older crime novels are revived by screenwriters and directors rather than publishing houses. In many such cases, publishers then follow suit and release a so-called "film tie-in" edition showing a still from the movie on the front cover and the film credits on the back cover of the book — yet another marketing strategy aimed at those cinemagoers who may want to do both: first read the book and then watch the film (or vice versa). Recent examples include Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (originally published in 1955), Ira Levin's Sliver (1991), with the cover photograph depicting a steamy sex scene between Sharon Stone and William Baldwin straight from the 1993 movie, and, again, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991). Bloomsbury Publishing PLC on the other hand have launched what they call "Bloomsbury Film Classics" — a series of original novels on which feature films were based. This series includes, for example, Ethel Lina White's novel The Wheel Spins (1936), which Alfred Hitchcock — before he went to Hollywood — turned into a much-loved movie entitled The Lady Vanishes (1938), and Ira Levin's (born 1929) science fiction thriller The Boys from Brazil (1976), which was filmed in 1978.

Older novels can often be retrieved from the ever-growing Project Gutenberg database.

See also[link]

Novels portal

• The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time
• Detective fiction
• Murder mystery game
• Mystery fiction
• Mystery film
• List of crime writers
• List of female detective characters
• Whodunit
• Hardboiled
• Art theft
• Crime Writers' Association
• Crime comics
• Giallo

References[link]

• Binyon, T J: "Murder Will Out". The Detective in Fiction (Oxford, 1990, ISBN 0-19-282730-8)
• The Crown Crime Companion. The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time Selected by the Mystery Writers of America, annotated by Otto Penzler, compiled by Mickey Friedman (New York, 1995, ISBN 0-517-88115-2)
• De Andrea, William L: Encyclopedia Mysteriosa. A Comprehensive Guide to the Art of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television (New York, 1994, ISBN 0-02-861678-2)
• Duncan, Paul: Film Noir. Films of Trust and Betrayal (Harpenden, 2000, ISBN 1-903047-08-0)
• The Hatchards Crime Companion. 100 Top Crime Novels Selected by the Crime Writers' Association, ed. Susan Moody (London, 1990, ISBN 0-904030-02-4)
• Hitt, Jim: Words and Shadows. Literature on the Screen (New York, 1992, ISBN 0-8065-1340-3)
• Mann, Jessica: Deadlier Than the Male (David & Charles, 1981. Macmillan,N.Y, 1981)
• McLeish, Kenneth and McLeish, Valerie: Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Murder. Crime Fiction and Thrillers (London, 1990, ISBN 0-13-359092-5)
• Ousby, Ian: The Crime and Mystery Book. A Reader's Companion (London, 1997).
• Symons, Julian: Bloody Murder. From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (Harmondsworth, 1974).
• Waterstone's Guide to Crime Fiction, ed. Nick Rennison and Richard Shephard (Brentford, 1997).
• Willett, Ralph: The Naked City. Urban Crime Fiction in the USA (Manchester, 1996).
• Classic Crime Fiction

External links[link]

• World's Best Detective, Crime, and Murder Mystery Books

Michael Robotham (born November 1960) is an Australian crime fiction writer.

Formerly a journalist with the Fairfax Press in Sydney he travelled to London and got a job on Fleet Street in 1986. He later became the best-selling pseudonymous author of ten "autobiographies" of people in the arts, Military and sport. He returned to Australia with his family in 1996 and took to writing full-time.

Awards and nominations[link]

• Ned Kelly Awards for Crime Writing, Best Novel, 2005: winner for Lost
• Ned Kelly Awards for Crime Writing, Best Novel, 2007: shortlisted for The Night Ferry
• Crime Writers' Association (UK), The CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, 2007: shortlisted for The Night Ferry
• Ned Kelly Awards for Crime Writing, Best Novel, 2008: winner for Shatter
• Crime Writers' Association (UK), The CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, Best Thriller, 2008: shortlisted for Shatter

Bibliography[link]

Novels[link]

• The Suspect (2004) ISBN 978-0-7515-4417-6
• Lost (2005) (aka The Drowning Man) ISBN 978-0-7515-4422-0
• The Night Ferry (2007)
• Shatter (2008) ISBN 978-0-7515-3731-4
• Bombproof (2008) ISBN 978-0-7515-4204-2
• Bleed For Me (2010) ISBN 978-0-7515-4109-0
• The Wreckage (2011) ISBN 978-1-84744-220-8

Interviews[link]

• "Shots ezine" [1] 2003
• "The Advertiser" [2] June 26, 2007
• "The Age" [3] August 19, 2007
• "reviewingtheevidence" [4] Undated, possibly end 2007
• "The Book Show" - discussion with Peter Temple [5] July 25, 2008

References[link]

• Author's official website

This article about an Australian writer is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Denise Mina
Born	1966 Glasgow, Scotland
Nationality	Scottish
Genres	Crime fiction
www.denisemina.co.uk

Denise Mina (born 1966, Glasgow) is a Scottish crime writer and playwright. She has written the Garnethill trilogy and another three novels featuring the character Patricia "Paddy" Meehan, a Glasgow journalist. Described as an author of Tartan Noir, she has also dabbled in comic book writing, having recently written 13 issues of Hellblazer.^[1] Since 2006, she has had two plays performed with successful reception.

Mina's first Paddy Mehan novel, The Field Of Blood, has recently been filmed by the BBC for broadcast in 2011, and stars Jayd Johnson, Peter Capaldi and David Morrissey.^[2]

Biography[link]

Denise Mina was born in Glasgow in 1966. Her father worked as an engineer. Because of his work, the family moved 21 times in 18 years: from Paris to The Hague, London, Scotland and Bergen. Mina left school at sixteen and worked in a variety of low-skilled jobs, including: bar maid, kitchen porter and cook. She also worked for a time in a meat processing factory. Prior to attending university in her twenties, she worked in auxiliary nursing for geriatric and terminal care patients.

It was while researching a PhD thesis on the ascription of mental illness to female offenders, and teaching criminology and criminal law at Strathclyde University in the 1990s, that she decided to write her first novel Garnethill. Published in 1998 by Transworld, the book won the Crime Writers' Association John Creasy Dagger for Best First Crime Novel.

Mina lives in Glasgow.

Bibliography[link]

Novels[link]

Garnethill trilogy[link]

• Garnethill (1998)
• Exile (2000)
• Resolution (2001)

Patricia "Paddy" Meehan novels[link]

• The Field of Blood (2005)
• The Dead Hour (2006)
• The Last Breath (2007) - published as Slip of the Knife in America

Alex Morrow novels[link]

• Still Midnight (2009)
• The End of the Wasp Season (2010)
• Gods and Beasts (2012)

Other novels[link]

• Sanctum (2003) (published as Deception in the US in 2004)

Comics[link]

• Hellblazer, # 216-228 (DC Comics, 2006–2007)
  • "Empathy is the Enemy" collected Hellblazer issues 216–222
  • "The Red Right Hand" collected Hellblazer issues 223–228

Plays[link]

• Ida Tamson (2006)
• A Drunk Woman Looks at the Thistle (2007), inspired by Hugh MacDiarmid's long modernist poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, and first performed by Karen Dunbar.

[edit] Radio Plays

• The Meek, BBC Radio 3, 7 March 2009

Comic Collections and Graphic Novels[link]

• Hellblazer: Empathy is the Enemy (2006)
• Hellblazer: The Red Right Hand (2007)
• A Sickness in the Family (2010)^[3]

Denise Mina signing books at the Edinburgh International Book Festival

Notes[link]

1. ^ Irvine, Alex (2008), "John Constantine Hellblazer", in Dougall, Alastair, The Vertigo Encyclopedia, New York: Dorling Kindersley, pp. 102–111, ISBN 0-7566-4122-5, OCLC 213309015 
2. ^ Ellis, Maureen (13 December 2010), "Face to Face: Denise Mina", The Herald (Glasgow), http://www.heraldscotland.com/life-style/real-lives/face-to-face-denise-mina-1.1074064, retrieved 2010-12-14 
3. ^ Denise Mina Official Website

External links[link]

• Personal Website
• Denise Mina at Contemporary Writers (British Council)
• Still Midnight review and interview in The Scotsman
• Transcript and audio of Denise Mina talking with Ian Rankin at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, 17 August 2006
• End of the Wasp Season Review - ShotsMag Ezine

This article about a Scottish writer, poet or playwright is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

James Ellroy
Ellroy in 2011
Born	(1948-03-04) March 4, 1948 (age 64) Los Angeles, California, United States
Occupation	crime writer, essayist
Nationality	American
Genres	crime fiction, historical, mystery, noir

Lee Earle "James" Ellroy (born March 4, 1948) is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. Ellroy has become known for a so-called "telegraphic" prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences,^[1] and in particular for the novels The Black Dahlia (1987), The Big Nowhere (1988), L.A. Confidential (1990), White Jazz (1992), American Tabloid (1995), The Cold Six Thousand (2001), and Blood's a Rover (2009).

Life and career[link]

Ellroy was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Geneva Odelia (née Hilliker) Ellroy, a nurse, and Armand Ellroy, an accountant and, according to Ellroy, onetime business manager of Rita Hayworth.^[2] After his parents' divorce, Ellroy and his mother relocated to El Monte, California.^[3] In 1958, Ellroy's mother was murdered. The police never found the perpetrator, and the case remains unsolved. The murder, along with reading The Badge by Jack Webb (a book composed of sensational cases from the files of the Los Angeles Police Department, a birthday gift from his father), were important events of Ellroy's youth.^[3][4]

Ellroy's inability to come to terms with the emotions surrounding his mother's murder led him to transfer them onto another murder victim, Elizabeth Short, the "Black Dahlia"; throughout his youth, Ellroy used Short as a surrogate for his conflicting emotions and desires.^[3][5] His confusion and trauma led to a period of intense clinical depression, from which he recovered only gradually.^[3][4]

Ellroy dropped out of school. He joined the army for a short while. During his teens and twenties, he drank heavily and abused Benzedrex inhalers.^[6] He was engaged in minor crimes (especially shoplifting, house-breaking, and burglary) and was often homeless. After serving some time in jail and suffering a bout of pneumonia, during which he developed an abscess on his lung "the size of a large man's fist," Ellroy stopped drinking and began working as a golf caddy while pursuing writing.^[4][6] He later said, "Caddying was good tax-free cash and allowed me to get home by 2 p.m. and write books.... I caddied right up to the sale of my fifth book."^[7]

After a second marriage in the mid 1990s to Helen Knode (author of the 2003 novel The Ticket Out),^[8] the couple moved from California to Kansas City in 1995.^[9] In 2006, after their divorce, Ellroy returned to Los Angeles.^[10] He is a self-described hermit who possesses very few technological amenities, including television, and claims never to read contemporary books by other authors, aside from Joseph Wambaugh's The Onion Field, for fear that they might influence his own.^[11] However, this does not mean that Ellroy does not read at all, as he claims in My Dark Places to have read at least two books a week growing up, eventually shoplifting more to satisfy his love of reading. He then goes on to say that he read works by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler accompanied by abuse of alcohol and Benzedrex inhalers.

Literary career[link]

In 1981, Ellroy published his first novel, Brown's Requiem, a detective story drawing on his experiences as a caddy.^[12] He then published Clandestine and Silent Terror (which was later published under the title Killer on the Road). Ellroy followed these three novels with the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy, three novels centered on Hopkins, a police officer.

Writing style[link]

Hallmarks of his work include dense plotting and a relentlessly pessimistic—albeit moral—worldview.^[13][14] His work has earned Ellroy the nickname "Demon dog of American crime fiction."^[15]

Ellroy writes longhand on legal pads rather than on a computer^[16] and prepares elaborate outlines for his books, most of which are several hundred pages long.^[14]

Dialog and narration in Ellroy novels often consists of a "heightened pastiche of jazz slang, cop patois, creative profanity and drug vernacular" with a particular use of period-appropriate slang.^[17] He often employs stripped-down staccato sentence structures, a style that reaches its apex in The Cold Six Thousand and which Ellroy describes as a "direct, shorter-rather-than-longer sentence style that's declarative and ugly and right there, punching you in the nards."^[14] This signature style is not the result of a conscious experimentation but of chance and came about when he was asked by his editor to shorten his novel White Jazz from 900 pages to 350. Rather than removing any subplots, Ellroy achieved this by eliminating verbs, creating a unique style of prose.^{[citation needed]} While each sentence on its own is simple, the cumulative effect is a dense, baroque style.^[17]

The L.A. Quartet[link]

Ellroy at the LA Times Festival of Books, April 2009

While his early novels earned him a cult following, Ellroy earned much greater success and critical acclaim with the L.A. Quartet—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz.^[14] The four novels represent Ellroy's change of style from the tradition of classic modernist noir fiction of his earlier novels to so-called postmodern historiographic metafiction.^[18] The Black Dahlia, for example, fused the real-life murder of Elizabeth Short with a fictional story of two police officers investigating the crime.^[19]

Underworld USA Trilogy[link]

In 1995, Ellroy published American Tabloid, the first novel in a series informally dubbed the "Underworld USA Trilogy"^[13] that Ellroy describes as a "secret history" of the mid-to-late 20th century.^[14] Tabloid was named TIME's fiction book of year for 1995. Its follow-up, The Cold Six Thousand, became a bestseller.^[13] The final novel, Blood's a Rover, was released on September 22, 2009.

[edit] My Dark Places

After publishing American Tabloid, Ellroy began a memoir, My Dark Places, based on his memories of his mother's murder and his investigation of the crime.^[4] In the memoir, Ellroy mentions that his mother's murder received little news coverage because the media were still fixated on Johnny Stompanato's murder. Frank C. Girardot, a reporter for The San Gabriel Valley Tribune, accessed files on Geneva Hilliker Ellroy's murder from detectives with Los Angeles Police Department.^[4] Based on the cold case file, Ellroy and investigator Bill Stoner worked the case but gave up after fifteen months, believing any suspects to be dead.^[4] In 2008, The Library of America selected the essay "My Mother's Killer" from My Dark Places for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.

Future writings[link]

Ellroy is currently writing a "Second L.A. Quartet" taking place during the Second World War, with some characters from the first L.A. Quartet and the Underworld USA Trilogy returning younger. The first book is called Perfidia and would be released late 2012. ^{[20] [21] [22]}

Public life and views[link]

In media appearances, Ellroy has adopted an outsized, stylized public persona of hard-boiled nihilism and self-reflexive subversiveness.^[14] He frequently begins public appearances with a monologue such as:

Good evening peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps. I'm James Ellroy, the demon dog, the foul owl with the death growl, the white knight of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. I'm the author of 16 books, masterpieces all; they precede all my future masterpieces. These books will leave you reamed, steamed and drycleaned, tie-dyed, swept to the side, true-blued, tattooed and bah fongooed. These are books for the whole fuckin' family, if the name of your family is Manson.^[23]

Another aspect of his public persona involves an almost comically grand assessment of his work and his place in literature. For example, he told the New York Times, "I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music."^[24]

Ellroy frequently has espoused conservative political views, which have ranged from a vague anti-liberalism to authoritarianism.^[14] In an October 15, 2009, Rolling Stone interview, Ellroy said that in the 1960s and 1970s "I was never a peacemaker; I was a fuck-you right-winger." He has also been an outspoken and unquestioning admirer of the Los Angeles Police Department, and he dismisses the department's flaws as aberrations, telling the National Review that the coverage of the Rodney King beating and Rampart police scandals were overblown by a biased media.^[25] Nevertheless, like other aspects of his persona, he often deliberately obscures where his public persona ends and his actual views begin. When asked about his "right-wing tendencies," he told an interviewer, "Right-wing tendencies? I do that to fuck with people."^[26] Similarly, in the film Feast of Death, his (now ex-) wife describes his politics as "bullshit," an assessment to which Ellroy responds only with a knowing smile.^[9] Privately, Ellroy opposes the death penalty and favors gun control.^[27] Of the current political environment, Ellroy told Rolling Stone in 2009:

I thought Bush was a slimeball and the most disastrous American president in recent times. I voted for Obama. He's a lot like Jack Kennedy—they both have big ears and infectious smiles. But Obama is a deeper guy. Kennedy was an appetite guy. He wanted pussy, hamburgers, booze. Jack did a lot of dope.^[26]

Structurally, several of Ellroy's books, such as The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid, and The Cold Six Thousand, have three disparate points of view through different characters, with chapters alternating between them. Starting with The Black Dahlia, Ellroy's novels have mostly been historical dramas about the relationship between corruption and law enforcement.^[19]

A predominant theme of Ellroy's work is the myth of "closure." "Closure is bullshit," Ellroy often remarks, "and I would love to find the man who invented closure and shove a giant closure plaque up his ass."^[28]

Ellroy has claimed that he is done with noir crime novels. "I write big political books now," he says. "I want to write about LA exclusively for the rest of my career. I don't know where and when."^[29]

Film adaptations and screenplays[link]

Several of Ellroy's works have been adapted to film, including Blood on the Moon (adapted as Cop), L.A. Confidential, Brown's Requiem, Killer on the Road/Silent Terror (adapted as Stay Clean), and The Black Dahlia. In each instance, screenplays based on Ellroy's work have been penned by other screenwriters.

While he has frequently been disappointed by these adaptations (such as Cop), he was very complimentary of Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland's screenplay for L.A. Confidential at the time of its release.^[30] In succeeding years, however, his comments have been more reserved:

L.A. Confidential, the movie, is the best thing that happened to me in my career that I had absolutely nothing to do with. It was a fluke—and a wonderful one—and it is never going to happen again—a movie of that quality. Here’s my final comment on L.A. Confidential, the movie: I go to a video store in Prairie Village, Kansas. The youngsters who work there know me as the guy who wrote L.A. Confidential. They tell all the little old ladies who come in there to get their G-rated family flick. They come up to me, they say, “OOOO… you wrote L.A. Confidential.... Oh, what a wonderful, wonderful movie. I saw it four times. You don’t see storytelling like that on the screen anymore.” ... I smile, I say, “Yes, it’s a wonderful movie, and a salutary adaptation of my wonderful novel. But listen, Granny: You love the movie. Did you go out and buy the book?” And Granny invariably says, “Well, no, I didn’t.” And I say to Granny, “Then what the fuck good are you to me?”^[9]

Shortly after viewing three hours of unedited footage^[31] for Brian De Palma's adaptation of The Black Dahlia, Ellroy wrote an essay, "Hillikers," praising De Palma and his film.^[32] Ultimately, nearly an hour was removed from the final cut, and the film was a commercial and critical disappointment. Of the released film, Ellroy told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "Look, you’re not going to get me to say anything negative about the movie, so you might as well give up."^[17] He had, however, mocked the film's director, cast, and production design before it was filmed.^[33]

In 2008, Daily Variety reported that HBO, along with Tom Hanks's production company, Playtone, was developing American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand for either a miniseries or ongoing series.^[34]

Ellroy co-wrote the original screenplay for the 2008 film Street Kings but refused to do any publicity for the finished film.^[17]

In a 2009 interview, Ellroy himself stated, "All movie adaptations of my books are dead."^[35]

Bibliography[link]

• Brown's Requiem (1981)
• Clandestine (1982)
• Killer on the Road (originally published as Silent Terror) (1986)

Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy[link]

• Blood on the Moon (1984)
• Because the Night (1984)
• Suicide Hill (1985)
• L.A. Noir (omnibus edition) (1998)

L.A. Quartet[link]

• The Black Dahlia (1987)
• The Big Nowhere (1988)
• L.A. Confidential (1990)
• White Jazz (1992)

Underworld USA Trilogy[link]

James Ellroy talks about Blood's A Rover on Bookbits radio.

• American Tabloid (1995)
• The Cold Six Thousand (2001)
• Blood's a Rover (2009)

Short stories and essays[link]

• Dick Contino's Blues (issue number 46 of Granta magazine, Winter 1994)
• Hollywood Nocturnes (1994; UK title: Dick Contino's Blues and Other Stories)
• Crime Wave (1999)
• Destination: Morgue! (2004)

Autobiography[link]

• My Dark Places (1996)
• The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women (2010)

Editor[link]

• The Best American Mystery Stories 2002 (2002)
• The Best American Crime Writing 2005 (2005)
• The Best American Noir of the Century (2011)

Documentaries[link]

• 1993 James Ellroy: Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction
• 1995 White Jazz
• 2001 James Ellroy's Feast of Death
• 2006 Murder By The Book: James Ellroy
• 2010 Ellroy appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, talking about his life and influences.^[36]

Films[link]

• 1988 Cop
• 1997 L.A. Confidential
• 1998 Brown's Requiem
• 2002 Stay Clean
• 2002 Vakvagany
• 2002 Dark Blue
• 2003 Das Bus
• 2005 James Ellroy presents Bazaar Bizarre
• 2006 The Black Dahlia
• 2008 Street Kings
• 2008 Land of the Living
• 2011 Rampart
• 2012 White Jazz

Television[link]

• 1992 "Since I Don't Have You" adapted by Steven A. Katz for Showtime's Fallen Angels.
• 2011 James Ellroy's L.A.: City of Demons^[37]

References[link]