Word: ellroy
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Dark Places (Knopf). James Ellroy's mother was murdered in 1958, when her only child was 10. The crime was never solved, and the son affected to be glad he was no longer under her strict spell. But now that he has grown famous as a writer of crime fiction--by no coincidence--he has decided to re-open the case and his own wounds. Ellroy's search for his mother's killer transcends the personal; it is a gripping meditation on the men who kill and the women who die at their hands...
...narrative switches back and forth in time, from the Sunday morning, June 22, 1958, when Jean Ellroy's strangled body was discovered near a high school athletic field in El Monte, up to the recent past, when James, her only child, teams up with a retired member of the Los Angeles sheriff's department to investigate the old unsolved murder all over again. In between, Ellroy portrays the harrowing spell, unrecognized by him at the time, that his mother's fate cast over his adolescence and the sort of person and writer he would become...
Glad, he thinks, to be rid of his strict mother and living a largely undisciplined life with his feckless father, Ellroy grows addicted to crime stories: "Every book I read was a twisted homage to her. Every mystery solved was my love for her in ellipses." When his father dies, the still underage son goes into a long tailspin: alcohol, drugs, sleeping in public parks, petty burglaries, time in county jails. Miraculously, he rights himself and becomes a published writer. "I was hot to ascend," he says. "Ascension meant two things. I had to write a great crime novel...
...eventually wrote American Tabloid (1995), a crime novel that transcends the form in its imaginative breadth and depth. My Dark Places, which grew out of an article he wrote for GQ, is Ellroy's attempt to fulfill the second part of this bargain with himself, and it largely succeeds. Readers new to Ellroy may find his clipped, staccato prose disconcerting, particularly when it describes details of his mother's corpse and the procedures at her autopsy. He is also quite blunt about the sexual allure that memories of his mother--he calls her the Redhead--bring...
...statement shocks, as it was no doubt meant to, but it is a metaphor for Ellroy's narrative and investigative methods. Mere sentiment deflects the truth. Love and reconciliation can come only through knowledge, however horrifying. His journey toward his mother goes beyond the personal into a world of pain and redemption...