Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Crime Wave, a collection of reportage and short fiction, mixes truth and fiction without blinking. Ellroy investigates the unsolved murder of his mother, trying to make sense of the event that has determined the course of his life. He follows real-life L.A. Sheriff's Department Homicide men through their daily crime-ridden routines. He takes the O.J. Simpson trial as a launch pad for an insightful analysis of L.A. And he spices it all with two alliteratively lunatic novellas set on the tainted side of Hollywood's golden age. All in all, there is nothing particularly new about Crime...
What is shocking this time around is the juxtaposition of reportage and fiction, creating a creepy sense of disjuncture in the collection. Ellroy has never been one to be bashful. One can read his memoir My Dark Places to get the full story on how he whored, drank and drugged most of his youth away. He readily talks about his heady days of breaking into houses on the other side of the track to sniff rich women's panties. Candor is not a surprise to anyone familiar with his work...
Ellroy's prose is hard-hitting and relentless. His self-revelations are just as unflinching. From the non-fiction side of the book, "I hated and lusted for my mother and went at her through postmortem surrogates. I buried her in haste and burned flames for other murdered women. My mother's death corrupted and emboldened my imagination....I majored in crime and minored in vivisected women." It becomes difficult...
almost cruel, to enjoy the no-nonsensecertainty of the prose in the fiction when, justthe page before, one sees the near-necrophilictendency which powers his writing...
...those places. Simply put, I am from L.A. It exerts a hold on me, but it's an influence that I've sought consciously to move beyond....I will forever be associated with L.A., but aside from the occasional journalistic piece about L.A., and aside from satirical, parodistic short fiction about L.A. (the Danny Getchell stories), I will never use L.A. again...