James Ellroy: Crime Wave (UK 1999)

From the Publisher:
James Ellroy is a unique and powerful writer with a tough and explosive voice. His obsession with the dark side of Los Angeles is personal and vital, triggered by the murder of his mother when he was ten. 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. Ellroy exploits memory, history, fact and fiction with relentless energy and panache. What emerges is an intense, mythical version of tinseltown in the second half of the twentieth century.

James Ellroy: Crime Wave. Reportage and Fiction from the Underside of L.A. Arrow, ISBN: 0099279991 (October, 1999), 304 p., £6.99.

James Ellroy: Crime Wave (USA 1999)

From the Publisher:
Los Angeles. In no other city do sex, celebrity, money, and crime exert such an irresistible magnetic field. And no writer has mapped that field with greater savagery and savvy than James Ellroy. With this fever-hot collection of reportage and short fiction, he returns to his native habitat and portrays it as a smog-shrouded netherworld where "every third person is a peeper, prowler, pederast, or pimp."

From the scandal sheets of the 1950s to this morning's police blotter, Ellroy reopens true crimes and restores human dimensions to their victims. Sublimely, he resurrects the rag Hush-Hush magazine. And in a baroquely plotted novella of slaughter and corruption he enlists the forgotten luminaries of a lost Hollywood. Shocking, mesmerizing, and written in prose as wounding as an ice pick, Crime Wave is Ellroy at his best.

James Ellroy: Crime Wave. Reportage and Fiction from the Underside of L.A. Vintage Books, ISBN: 037570471X (February, 1999), 288 p., $13.95.