Word: dahlia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Conan O'Brien. Barely alighted on the hotseat, he announced, with appropriate finger gestures, that the President is hung like a cashew. The Crimson immediately pulled strings and waxed plaintive to get a one-on-one with the celebrated word-wrestler who delivered such literary punches as The Black Dahlia, American Tabloid and L.A. Confidential. Armed for the interview with nonsense and irreverence, The Crimson was taken aback to find a straight and staid character with answers to defeat over populated extremist myth in which we would like to outfit...
...entering my teens, though, I discovered my father's collection of mystery novels. I snuck the works of Chandler, Hammett, and others up to my bedroom and read them under the covers late at night, when I was sure that my parents were asleep. Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, which he calls "a valediction in blood," left me sleepless and staring at the ceiling for weeks, sure that I would come to an immediate and gory end if I so much as closed my eyes...
...above all kill for it. The world of noir is populated by gangsters, heiresses and thieves. The detective's work is usually motivated more by the promise of hard cash than anything else, though there are exceptions (notably Ellroy's haunted policemen in The Big Nowhere and The Black Dahlia). Now, as in the '40s when noir was at its peak, the economy is booming in an uprecedented way. Perhaps the consequences of money, its slovenly side, only interest readers when lots of money is to be had for the asking. The topics of noir are most easily available...
James Ellroy has told this story from his own childhood before, mainly to journalists attracted to his growing renown as a writer of dark, scarifyingly violent crime novels (The Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential). The anecdote enhanced his reputation, setting him off from his competitors. How many other toilers in the thriller trade could claim a mother murdered in a crime still unsolved? But My Dark Places (Knopf; 355 pages; $25) rehearses this unhappy history with a lot more than instant publicity in mind. Part memoir, part detective story, part meditation on the kind of men who kill and the women...
...YEARS AGO, JAMES ELLROY picked up a copy of Libra, Don DeLillo's 1988 fictional meditation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At the time, Ellroy was a writer with a growing cult reputation; his crime novels, set in his native Los Angeles--The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential--had shown up on paperback best-seller lists and inspired much chatter among mystery fans: here was a guy who had pushed the genre way, way past hardboiled, into the realm of the terminally scalded. Ellroy seemed set on a path toward at least a shot...