My Dark Places: A True Crime Autobiography - Softcover

Ellroy, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679762051 ISBN 13: 9780679762058

Publisher: Vintage, 1997

Synopsis

The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary masterpiece, this time a true crime murder mystery about his own mother.

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  

"Astonishing . . . original, daring, brilliant."
--Philadelphia Inquirer

About this title

Review

James Ellroy's trademark is his language: it is sometimes caustically funny and always brazen. When he's hitting on all cylinders, as he is in My Dark Places, his style makes punchy rhythms out of short sentences using lingo such as "scoot" (dollar), "trim" (sex), and "brace" (to interrogate). But the premise for My Dark Places is what makes it especially compelling: Ellroy goes back to his own childhood to investigate the central mystery behind his obsession with violence against women--the death of his mother when he was 10 years old. It's hard to imagine a more psychologically treacherous, more self-exposing way in which to write about true crime. The New York Times calls it a "strenuously involving book.... Early on, Mr. Ellroy makes a promise to his dead mother that seems maudlin at first: 'I want to give you breath.' But he's done just that and--on occasion--taken ours away."

From the Publisher

What the Critics Have Said About James Ellroy:

"Ellroy is the poet of the bad conscience...He's no Virgil, but then, no guide will tell you more about the feel of hell than one who's lived there."
-Carey Harrison, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"He's not merely a great hard-boiled crime fiction writer. Let's take the leap: James Ellroy is developing into one of the great American writers of our time."
-Todd Grimson, Los Angeles Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0679762051
• ISBN 13: 9780679762058
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 427