My Dark Places

Ellroy, James

ISBN 10: 0679459413 ISBN 13: 9780679459415

Publisher: Random House Audio, 1996

Synopsis

2 cassettes / 3 hours
Read by the Author
"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  

About this title

Review

James Ellroy's hard-boiled detective fiction is like Raymond Chandler's with a darker post-modern edge. His heroes are almost as nasty as the scum they track through a sordid underworld. This non-fiction book is written in much the same style as his fiction, with his trademark staccato prose, his expletive-laden dialog, his air of worldly cynicism. Yet here Ellroy is writing of a real-life murder, that of his own mother, who was strangled to death in sensational film noir circumstances in 1958 when he was ten. Ellroy's memoir tells how he hired a retired police detective to help him investigate the never-solved crime. Ellroy gets to play a real private P.I. as the two follow various leads. They don't close the case, but the book reveals some of the demons that have fueled Ellroy's fiction.

From the Publisher

This is not an AudioBook for the squeamish. Not only is this one of the best true-crime books I've ever read (or in this case, listened to), but it's his voice that puts it over the top. I listened to My Dark Places while walking around the city one Saturday afternoon. I remember leaving home, I remember flipping over the cassette - but the rest is a blur. This story will have you in a trance until he breathes his last word....
-Carrie, Random House AudioBooks Publicity

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Audio
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679459413
• ISBN 13: 9780679459415
• Binding: Audio Cassette