Bøker av James Ellroy

America is about to emerge into a bright new age - an age that will last until the 1000 days of John F Kennedy's presidency.

Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal Japanese-Americans - but now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins. It is World War II as you have never seen it, and Los Angeles as James Ellroy has never written it before.

The Demon Dog of American Letters goes straight to the tragic heart of postwar Hollywood with the story of Marilyn Monroe's untimely death, in an astonishing, ripped-from-the-headlines crime story. This is a luminous psychological drama, an unparalleled thrill ride, and a transcendent work of American popular fiction.

LA, 1962. Marilyn Monroe ODs. The Chief calls in Freddy Otash, a tainted ex-cop and freelance extortionist. He tears through all those who block his path to the truth and tracks down Marilyn Monroe's horrific last charade through a nightmare L.A. that he served to create. It's the Summer of '62, baby, and Freddy O.'s got a hot date with history.

A startling panorama of Los Angeles in the fifties. New Year's Eve as 1949 turns to 1950, Los Angeles: The City of Angels has becomes the city of the Angel of Death. Communist witch-hunts and insanely violent killings are terrorising the community.

Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire.Klein's been hung out as bait, "a bad cop to draw the heat," and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, from racketeers and drug kingpins--all of them hell-bent on keeping their own secrets hidden.

The Black Dahlia depicts the infrastructure of L.A.'s most sensational murder case. And the inglorious Los Angeles Police Department to disentangle the conspiracy that links it all together. White Jazz gives us the tortured confession of a cop who's gone to the bad - killer, slum landlord and parasitic exploiter.

One of the best (and longest) crime novels ever written, it is the heart of Ellroy's four-novel masterpiece, the LA Quartet, and an example of crime writing at its most powerful.

There follows a hellish five-year ride through the sordid underbelly of public policy via Las Vegas, Howard Hughes, Vietnam, CIA dope dealing, Cuba, sleazy showbiz, racism and the Klan. This is the 1960s under Ellroy's blistering lens, the icons of the era mingled with cops, killers, hoods, and provocateurs.

It's 1968. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King are dead. The Mob, Howard Hughes and J Edgar Hoover are in a struggle for America's soul, drawing into their murderous conspiracies the dammed and the soon-to-be damned. Wayne Tedrow Jr: parricide, assassin, dope cooker, mouthpiece for all sides, loyal to none.

Los Angeles - Fritz Brown, ex-alcoholic private eye with a stained past, makes do with car repossessions and classical music. Then he is offered a case by Freddy 'Fat Dog' Baker, an eccentric golf caddy whose sister has made off with a much older man.

The author of The Black Dahlia presents the powerful second novel in his L.A. Quartet. In The Big Nowhere, three men are caught up in a massive web of ambition, perversion and deceit. A remarkably vivid portrait of a remarkable time and place.

And we're there in Dallas in 1963 where it all comes to a brutal end. The Cold Six Thousand the cover-up for the Kennedy assassination begins. This time the ride takes us from Dallas to Vietnam to Las Vegas to Memphis to Cuba to the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in L.A.

Blood's a Rover takes us into the 70s. A kid private eye clashes with a mob goon and an enforcer for FBI director Edgar Hoover in L.A. There's an armoured-car heist and a cache of missing emeralds. Amidst all this, all three anti-heros fall for Red revolutionary Joan Rosen Klein. Each will pay 'a dear and savage price to live History'.

'James Ellroy is a genius: the finest American crime writer since Raymond Chandler, and one of the most readable experimental writers in the world' TLS'All Ellroy's preoccupations are present: corruption, sex, violence, unsolved murders and excess by the dozen.

Los Angeles 1951 - Frederick Underhill, an ambitious rookie of the Los Angeles Police Department, want to become the most celebrated detective of his time.

The year was 1958. Jean Hilliker had divorced her fast-buck hustler husband and resurrected her maiden name. Her son, James, was ten years old. He hated and lusted for his mother and "summoned her dead." She was murdered three months later.

The Big Nowhere , LA Confidential and White Jazz. In his intoduction to The Best American Noir of the Century, James Ellroy writes, "noir is the most scrutinised offshoot of the hard-boiled school of fiction.

Somewhere out there is a murderer with over twenty killings to his name - each an apparently random slaying of a woman, over a twenty-year period and all unconnected on the police files. But Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins begins to see a pattern: he senses connections between this string of seemingly motiveless, pointless and unsolved killings.

Joe caught Klein flush in the stomach and ripped upward with both hands. Simply select a bank manager, kidnap his girlfriend, then hold her hostage until you've cleaned out the bank. Investigating is Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins, eager for a chance to clear his tarnished reputation.

James Ellroy is a unique and powerful writer with a tough and explosive voice. This defining event spawned an early addiction to paperback crime novels, and Ellroy's own writing is saturated in an often violent underworld of bent cops, politicians, stars, sleeze and rumour.