Getting drenched in violence when you are a child should never be part of an understandable reality. But this world is much less than understandable, being completely unintelligible at times. James Ellroy suffered in the depths of his being the impact of the unreason of a finalist violence ...
The best thing about childhood, however, is the ability to overcome, resilience, and the ultimate sublimation of dark memories. Because the last days with his mother were not ideal to be considered a momentous farewell ...
The murder of his mother at age 10 must have sown the ideals of the writer of Novelty that came many years later. Perhaps that was the best way James found to assume that there was no adult response to his mother's violent death.
And when James started writing he never stopped. Each new publication was always accompanied by the support of a devoted public. 40 years have passed since Requiem for Brown, his first novel. And although the particular issues of the past have no remedy, the writer was born to appease any vestige of guilt, remorse or sadness.
Today James Ellroy professes the same old devotion to unraveling crime, of the fact itself from its approach to its execution. All a scientific analysis to try to understand the murderer's motives and the theatrical part of the killing dementia.
Black novels his that navigate between the obsessions of the mind and its meanders until the last evil, even the worst of sins by his intention of will supplanting God: murder.
3 essential novels by James Ellroy
The black dahlia
Perhaps this is a novel where the author makes a notable leap in quality. This is not to discredit the above, but in this novel a mastery of tempo is already discovered, an interesting lyrical point in the composition that contrasts with the noir genre and that, however, makes it shine with that magic of counterpoint...
Summary: On January 15, 1947, in a Los Angeles lot, the naked and sectioned corpse of a young woman appeared. The forensic doctor determined that she had been tortured for days. Elizabeth Short, 22, called the Black Dahlia, will take detectives to the Hollywood underworld to involve certain wealthy people in Los Angeles.
Both are obsessed with what the Black Dahlia's life was like, and, above all, with capturing the individual who murdered her... The book that inspired the acclaimed film directed by Brian de Palma and starring Scarlett Johansson and Josh Harnett.
LA Confidential
In the third of the Los Angeles Quartet novels, James already handles himself with a solvency that borders on perfection. Despite the excessive violence and a very black black environment in which the entire society of Los Angeles plunges into the dark waters of corruption and vice, the author manages to offer us brightness of humanity, of literary redemption of the human soul capable of slipping away from vice with its bloody shreds…
Summary: Los Angeles, the fifties, a fascinating time full of nuances. Pornography. Police corruption. Intrigues in the underworld. A heinous mass murder becomes a central axis of the lives of the victims and the executioners.
Three cops staggering in quicksand Ed Exley, thirsty for glory, capable of breaking any law to outshine his father, former cop and great tycoon. Bud White, a time bomb with an agent badge, eager to avenge his mother's brutal death. A classic title in literature and film history after its successful adaptation in 1997.
White jazz
White Jazz is an extraordinary novel, the brutal fresco of a city where stark ambitions reign, and it closes in a masterful way the "Los Angeles Quartet", a tetralogy that has become a classic of the black novel of the XNUMXth century.
Murders, beatings, bribes and extortion: occupational hazards for David Klein, a lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department, a city gripped by a complex network of mobsters, politicians and police officers in which our anti-hero is known as "the executioner".
When in the fall of 1958 the Feds launch an exhaustive investigation into police corruption, chaos ensues. Klein is the center of the accusations and her life seems to be falling apart. He, however, is willing to do anything to get out alive.
Other recommended books by James Ellroy…
Crazy about donna
I like this novel for a very interesting aspect, that of the contradictions of the human being. If love is the noblest of our possible feelings, how can it go through the entire spectrum of possible light until it reaches the other end? A noir novel like this doesn't give us the answer, but in a way it leads us through the ins and outs of the perdition that is living with love like a sword of Damocles.
Summary: An intense love story, which lasts for more than twenty years, between a maddened police officer from the Los Angeles Department and an actress. Again James Ellroy introduces us to his particular world: corruption, obsessions, revenge, unsolved cases and a love full of intensity and romance.
