We all know Ellroy as the loquacious author of nouveau noir mysteries like "The Black Dahlia" and "L.A. Confidential," but by now it may be only a handful of jolly oldsters (those few with tread remaining after their trip down the autobahn of time 'n' toxins) who will recall red-haired Baker as one third -- "the drumming third" -- of the seminal, incendiary and unfailingly psychoactive '60s supergroup Cream. Bassist Jack Bruce and a lead guitarist (and reluctant deity) by the name of Clapton completed the tripped-out triumvirate. Anyway, we'll get back to the carrot-top skin beater in a few.

Ellroy, the man with the obsidian soul and the polychrome brain, showed up in the Observer because he's getting his bad self sued to the tune of $20 million by an elderly ex-furrier named Albert Teitelbaum. Mr. Teitelbaum, 84, dropped the bomb on Ellroy because his novella, "Tijuana, Mon Amour," first published in two parts in GQ magazine earlier this year, invades the former furrier's privacy and libels him. Or so Teitelbaum charges. "Tijuana, Mon Amour" is included in Ellroy's recently published "Crime Wave," a collection of his GQ pieces.

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Though Teitelbaum is now retired in Oregon, he was once the owner of Teitelbaum Furs on Rodeo Drive in the rolling-in-it Hills of Beverly, "a bit player," as Carl Swanson's Observer article describes him, "in the postwar Los Angeles that has so captured Mr. Ellroy's imagination."

One of Ellroy's gifts is his ability to seamlessly weave real characters into the fabric of his fiction -- always tough and tawdry stuff. Unfortunately, as Swanson points out, that's why Teitelbaum's putting the whomp on him. "It seems that, usually, the real characters who populate Mr. Ellroy's books are 100 percent libel proof," Swanson writes, "because they are (1) public figures and (2) dead." Teitlebaum, however, is neither 1 nor 2, but he is employed as a major character, described as the "furtive furrier," in "Tijuana, Mon Amour." In the story, Ellroy has Teitelbaum indulging in bad behavior, such as posing "buck naked" in photos with two women, one of whom is real-life convicted murderer Barbara Graham (executed in 1955), and staging a fur heist to scam insurance money (for which Teitelbaum -- something of a lost angel in his Los Angeles days -- actually served slammer time).

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