james Ellroy is a publicist's dream. He's got a dynamite story, loves doing press and has no discernible sense of shame. For over 15 years, Ellroy has been writing crime novels set in 1950s Los Angeles -- where he grew up -- in lean, bleak prose once described as "so hard-boiled it burns the pot." His fascination with murdered women, particularly the infamous, unsolved "Black Dahlia" case, is, as he has repeatedly pointed out, rooted in the mysterious killing of his own mother in 1958, when he was 10. "My Dark Places," Ellroy's recently published memoir, records his attempt, at age 46, to investigate his mother's murder. Enlisting the help of a retired L.A. County Sheriff's Department homicide detective named Bill Stoner, he sifts through piles of decades-old evidence, rousting octogenarian witnesses and suspects and gradually learning how to truly mourn his loss. The book is a corrosively addictive read, not the least because Ellroy gives himself no quarter, describing his squalid post-murder life (drugs, shoplifting, homelessness, creepy voyeurism, petty crime, white supremacism, jail time, 12-hour masturbatory sessions) in pitiless detail. Such relentless self-exposure requires a cast-iron ego, which Ellroy possesses in spades. Tall and lean, he's so amped up even in his married middle-age that it's a bit frightening to imagine him as an adolescent speed freak. He leaves his interlocutor in no doubt as to who runs a James Ellroy interview, but since no topic is off-limits, and it's a helluva ride, who's complaining? -- By LAURA MILLER You once wrote a fictionalized version of your mother's murder, didn't you? My second novel, "Clandestine," was a chronologically altered, greatly fictionalized account, yes. I solved the case in that book. People expect that in a detective novel. People will probably hope for that with this book, and it doesn't exactly happen. When you compare "Clandestine" and "My Dark Places," how do you think you understood your mother's murder? With "Clandestine," I was 32 years old, very ambitious. I was still caddying full-time at a Los Angeles country club and I wanted to get rid of the story. I wanted to prove myself impervious to my mother's presence and to get on with it. I wanted to delay the writing of "The Black Dahlia," the book I really wanted to write, until I was better. I made my father the killer, even though in real life my father was with me at the time the crime occurred. I got rid of it, I go, "OK, great, that's done." I didn't know at that time that you can't run from such an overweening presence. That was 1980. I wrote "The Black Dahlia" in '85 and '86 and dedicated the book to my mother. I wept when I finished the book. Then I cold-heartedly decided that I would go out and utilize my mother's murder to promote the "Black Dahlia." I understood that it was a very easy story for journalists to comprehend. Boy loses mother, unsolved killing. Boy, bereft, seizes on Black Dahlia murder case to express the grief he never felt on the occasion of his mother's death. Many years later, after a tragic youth and subsequent resurrection, boy becomes bestselling novelist and writes book, dedicates to mother. I did that. I went out and glibly used that story to promote the book. I thought I had shot my mother down that way. Again, I was very mistaken. It wasn't until a confluence of events -- [Ellroy's wife] Helen giving me a picture of myself taken just after the murder, [Ellroy's friend] Frank Girardo telling me he was going to see my mother's murder file, seeing the file myself and meeting Bill Stoner -- that I realized the extent to which my mother's death had formed me. I was only three columns down, reading the first report in the file, and I knew I couldn't run -- I couldn't go back. I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective. There had to be a book in this. But you had always made a big deal out of your mother's death. It was intellectual. I am the most well-adjusted human being I know. I started out this investigation as a very happy man with a great career. I've got the life people dream about: I am rich, I am famous, I've got a fabulous marriage to an absolutely, spell-bindingly brilliant woman. I was not bemoaning. I don't regret my past. I wouldn't go back and change it. My mother was murdered. She gave me gifts -- her death did. Those gifts have stood me in very good stead. I cannot go back and undo the past. I never even think of what might have happened had she lived. Would I be a writer? I had gone to great lengths in my life, in my career, to seek consciousness and get better and better. That eclipsed everything with me, everything in my subconscious. Seeking consciousness? Yes. Seeking consciousness. I will be a better writer. I will take the risk, will write the book that takes longer, the book that will destroy genre strictures. The book that might not be as magnanimously praised as the books of lessers who adhere to genre strictures. I will risk sales. I will risk losing this big income of mine to write better books. That's the world that I lived in. The other part of the world is going out and promoting everything to the hilt. That completely eclipsed my emotional awareness of my mother and the effect of her death on me. It wasn't until I went back and saw the file that I said, Oh shit. Next: Looking at his mother's murder photos |