James Ellroy

Rånet mot restaurangen Nite Owl urartar till ett blodbad. Brottet utgör kärnan i James Ellroys hypnotiska roman om 1950-talets Los Angeles. I en vardag med polisbrutalitet, korrumperade domare och en undre värld som hotar att explodera i uppror mot gangsterkungen Mickey Cohen, följer vi tre polisers till synes hopplösa kamp för sanningen. Var och en arbetar i hemlighet på egna utredningar - samtliga leder till Nite Owl-fallet. De inser alla livsfaran det innebär att veta för mycket om fallet, men då är det för sent att dra sig ur. De tvingas fortsätta att jaga orsakerna till morden för att få en chans att själva överleva. JAMES ELLROY föddes 1948. När han var tio år gammal blev hans mamma brutalt mördad, ett mord som aldrig uppklarats, och som haft en avgörande betydelse för Ellroys liv och författarskap. Han debuterade med Browns rekviem [1981], och har sedan dess skrivit en lång rad historiska romaner som revolutionerat kriminalromangenren. Några av hans böcker har blivit storfilmer i Hollywood. Inte minst L.A. konfidentiellt som utkom i original 1990 och blev en New York Times Bestseller. »En av de största amerikanska författarna i vår tid.« LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW »Ingen i vår generation kan matcha bredden och djupet i James Ellroys variant av Noir. DETROIT NEWS »Du riskerar att bli skuren i bitar bara av att vända blad.« VILLAGE VOICE

1958 blev Jean Ellroy brutalt mördad och hennes kropp dumpad mitt på gatan i en förort till Los Angeles. Hennes mördare hittades aldrig, polisen sorterade bort henne som bara ännu ett offer för en labil lördagsnatt i L.A. James Ellroy var tio när han förlorade sin mor och spenderade de närmaste trettiosex åren med att fly hennes spöke, bland annat genom att nyuppfinna kriminalromangenren. Men så en dag på nittiotalet slutade han fly. Han återvände till Los Angeles, för att finna sanningen om sin mor - och sig själv. Mina mörka vrår är den självbiografiska berättelsen av Noir-mästaren James Ellroy. Han redogör för den fåfänga jakten på sin mors mördare och den helvetesvandring som händelsen innebar för honom själv. En mörk epik utvecklar sig, om sorg, besatthet och försoning - och en lika svindlande som sann historik över det amerikanska våldet. JAMES ELLROY föddes 1948. Han debuterade som författare med Browns rekviem [1981], och har sedan dess skrivit en rad historiska romaner som revolutionerat deckargenren, med Ellroys våldsamt förtätade »telegramstil«. Några av böckerna har blivit storfilmer i Hollywood, såsom L.A. konfidentiellt från 1990 och Den svarta dahlian från 1987. »Ellroy är mäktigare än någonsin.« THE NATION »Häpnadsväckande... Originellt. Modigt. Briljant.« PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER # Årets mest läsvärda bok i NEW YORK TIMES # Årets bok i TIME MAGAZINE # 1 Bestseller i LOS ANGELES TIMES

"Well worth its impressive weight in gold, it would be a crime not to have this seminal masterpiece in your collection."--New York Journal of Books In his introduction to The Best American Noir of the Century, James Ellroy writes, "Noir is the most scrutinized offshoot of the hard-boiled school of fiction. It's the long drop off the short pier and the wrong man and the wrong woman in perfect misalliance. It's the nightmare of flawed souls with big dreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing that goes bad." Offering the best examples of literary sure things gone bad, this collection ensures that nowhere else can readers find a darker, more thorough distillation of American noir fiction. James Ellroy and Otto Penzler mined writings of the past century to find this treasure trove of thirty-nine stories. From noir's twenties-era infancy come gems like James M. Cain's "Pastorale," and its postwar heyday boasts giants like Mickey Spillane and Evan Hunter. Packing an undeniable punch, diverse contemporary incarnations include Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, Dennis Lehane, and William Gay, with many page-turners appearing from the past decade. "Delightfully devilish . . . A strange trek through the years that includes stories from household names in the hard-boiled genre to lesser-known authors who nonetheless can hold their own with the legends."--Associated Press James Ellroy is the author of the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy--American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's a Rover--and the L.A. Quartet novels, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He is also the author of The Hillicker Curse, a memoir. Otto Penzler is the founder of the Mysterious Bookshop and Mysterious Press, has won two Edgar Allan Poe Awards, and is series editor of The Best American Mystery Stories.

The New York Times bestselling crime writer and author of The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential gives us a searing, candid memoir about his obsession with women, his related search for atonement, and his remarkable literary career. - "Forceful and unsparing in its revelations.... Marvelous fury, passion and energy." --San Francisco Chronicle The year was 1958. Jean Hilliker had divorced her hustler husband and resurrected her maiden name. Her son, James, was ten years old. In a dark moment, he "summoned her dead." Three months later she was murdered. The curse was evoked, and James Ellroy began his unending pursuit of women. Here, he unsparingly describes his shattered childhood, his delinquent teens, his writing life, his love affairs and marriages, his nervous breakdown, and the beginning of a relationship with an extraordinary woman who may just be the long-sought Her. A startling revelation, a treatise on guilt and the power of malediction, and above all, a heartfelt confession, The Hilliker Curse is a brilliant, soul-baring revelation of self.

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.

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 internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. A rip-roaring, devilishly wild ride through the bloody end of the 1960's. It's dark baby, and hot hot hot. Martin Luther King assassinated. Robert Kennedy assassinated. Los Angeles, 1968. Conspiracies theories are taking hold. On the horizon looms the Democratic Convention in Chicago and constant gun fire peppers south L.A. Violence, greed, and grime, are replacing free-love and everybody from Howard Hughes, Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover to the right-wing assassins and left-wing revolutionaries are getting dirty. At the center of it all is a triumvirate: the president's strong-arm goon, an ex-cop and heroine runner, and a private eye whose quarry is so dangerous she could set off the whole powder keg. With his trademark deadly staccato prose, James Ellroy holds nothing back in this wild, startling and much anticipated conclusion to his Underworld USA trilogy.

Dig it. A famous musician-cum-draft dodger is plotting the perfect celebrity snatch-his own. An ex-con raging on revenge in High Darktown becomes a cop's worst nightmare. While chasing kidnappers, two cops stumble on an okie town as bloody as the O.K. Corral. A strongarm for Howard Hughes and mobster Mickey Cohen finds himself playing both ends against the middle, all for a murderously magnificent moll. This is L.A., Ellroy style-corrupt cops, goons with guns, rattling roadsters-and all in the staccato rhythm of the streets. Hollywood Nocturnes shows us the seedy side of glamorous Hollywood, laid out like a corpse in the morgue.

Assigned as liaison officer to an FBI investigation into a series of ingenious bank robberies, LAPD homicide detective Lloyd Hopkins uncovers unsavory information about his sworn enemy, the commander of the Internal Affairs Division, Fred Gaffney. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

A botched liquor store heist leaves three grisly dead. A hero cop is missing. Nobody could see a pattern in these two stray bits of information no one except Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins, a brilliant and disturbed L.A. cop with an obsessive desire to protect the innocent. To him they lead to one horrifying conclusion--a killer is on the loose and preying on his city. From the master of L.A. noir comes this beautiful and brutal tale of a cop and a criminal squared off in a life and death struggle."

Before Charlie's Angels, Miami Vice, or NYPD Blue, there was Dragnet. From 1951 to 1959, Jack Webb starred as Sergeant Joe Friday in the most successful police drama in television history. Webb ("Just the facts, ma'am") was also the creator of Dragnet, and what made the show so revolutionary was its documentary-style format and the fact that each episode was "ripped" from the files of the LAPD. But 1950s television censors deemed many of the stories in the LAPD's files too violent or sensational for the airwaves. The Badge is Webb's collection of stories that could not be presented on TV: untold, behind-the-scenes accounts of the Black Dahlia murder, the Brenda Allen confessions, Stephen Nash's "thrill murders," and Donald Bashor's "sleeping lady murders," to name just a few. Case by case, The Badge takes readers on a spine chilling police tour through the dark, shadowy world of Los Angeles crime. It is a journey that, even four decades after it originally appeared in print, no reader is likely to forget.

Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins can't stand music, or any loud sounds. He's got a beautiful wife, but he can't get enough of other women. And instead of bedtime stories, he regales his daughters with bloody crime stories. He's a thinking man's cop with a dark past and an obsessive drive to hunt down monsters who prey on the innocent. Now, there's something haunting him. He sees a connection in a series of increasingly gruesome murders of women committed over a period of twenty years. To solve the case, Hopkins will dump all the rules and risk his career to make the final link and get the killer.

The best-selling author of L.A. Confidential and My Dark Places returns to the city of angels to present fourteen pieces of fiction and nonfiction that includes "Balls to the Wall," a reflection on boxing; the autobiographical "My Life as a Creep"; and three new novellas--"Hollywood Fuck Pad," "Hot Prowl Rape-O," and "Jungletown Jihad." Original. 50,000 first printing.

The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. In this savagely audacious novel, James Ellroy plants a pipe bomb under the America in the 1960s, lights the fuse, and watches the shrapnel fly. On November 22, 1963 three men converge in Dallas. Their job: to clean up the JFK hit's loose ends and inconvenient witnesses. They are Wayne Tedrow, Jr., a Las Vegas cop with family ties to the lunatic right; Ward J. Littell, a defrocked FBI man turned underworld mouthpiece; and Pete Bondurant, a dope-runner and hit-man who serves as the mob's emissary to the anti-Castro underground. It goes bad from there. For the next five years these night-riders run a whirlwind of plots and counter-plots: Howard Hughes's takeover of Vegas, J. Edgar Hoover's war against the civil rights movement, the heroin trade in Vietnam, and the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Wilder than L. A. Confidential, more devastating than American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand establishes Ellroy as one of our most fearless novelists.

The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination--in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C. . . . Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy . . . Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty . . . Where three renegade law-enforcement officers--a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents--are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history. . . . James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open.

The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns--it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer--a power in his own small corner of hell. 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. For Klein, "forty-two and going on dead," it's dues time. Klein tells his own story--his voice clipped, sharp, often as brutal as the events he's describing--taking us with him on a journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, avarice, and perversion. It's a world he created, but now he'll do anything to get out of it alive. Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor edge, White Jazz is crime fiction at its most shattering.

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.

L.A. Confidential is epic "noir", a crime novel of astonishing detail and scope written by the bestselling author of The Black Dahlia. A horrific mass murder invades the lives of victims and victimizers on both sides of the law. And three lawmen are caught in a deadly spiral, a nightmare that tests loyalty and courage, and offers no mercy, grants no survivors.

The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy presents another literary masterpiece, this time a true crime murder mystery about his own mother. In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself. In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten--and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.

1953-1983: 30 years of American society, from the hope of Eisenhower's presidency, to the kinky flower generation, through the death of the dream, Charles Manson, the beginning of the twisted nightmare and the moral backlash of the 80s.