"Disingenuousness is a sin. I’m writing this essay in the spirit of atonement. My ongoing biography should be revised to reflect this..."

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A Conspiracy in Brentwood

At the scene of Marilyn Monroe's death, the evidence isn't adding up. Overdose, suicide, or murder? Follow rogue cop Freddy Otash down the rabbit hole in James Ellroy's latest Hollywood noir...

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Chevalier’s, Diesel, Vroman’s, Warwick’s, Book Passage, City Lights, Bookshop Santa Cruz

Dear Ellroyphiles and occasional viewers of this website:

I'm gassed to the gills this morning, kats and kittens. I just got the word that I will receive the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime excellence in writing about the American West. The Deliriously Downscale Demon Dog has gone uptown. This is a biiiiiiiiiig mainstream honor. I'll pluck my plaque and give a riotously ripsnorting speech at USC's boss Bovard Auditorium on the nite of Friday, April 21. I'll be performing at the Times book fair on the USC campus the following day. Scope the L.A. Times website for the dizzying dish on the Kirsch Awards and the book fair. This honor has me heroically humbled. I should note Golda Meir's withering quote: “Don't be so humble—you're not that great.”

God bless you. And—as always—thanXXX for reading my books and perusing my website. April in L.A.—I'll see you there.

Ellroy

Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

KJ: James, I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts and James Ellroy’s Hollywood Death Trip is not like any I’ve heard before. I absolutely love it. How do you describe it to people?

JE: These are personal documents that serve as a valediction in blood. The first true crime piece I ever wrote, for GQ magazine, was called “My Mother’s Killer.” It was about the experience of seeing my mother’s LA County Sheriff’s homicide file, unsolved, 36 years after the fact. Reading the file, commenting on the file, describing the file for the pages of GQ, detailing the nitty-gritty minutia of the file. And here it is, and I’m reading it now for Audio Up and Audible. And now I know why God made me a bass baritone: I’ve got a good voice for this.

Catch the rest and listent at the AUDIBLE BLOG or just GET THE PODCAST

Audio Up works with some of the greatest works of fiction, non-fiction and journalism from authors like Stephen King, James Ellroy, Playboy and Sun Records. Audio Up's Chief Creative Officer Jimmy Jellinek will lead a discussion on his experience creating innovative, scripted podcasts and will invite author James Ellroy, with whom Audio Up is working to adapt Ellroy's bestselling American Tabloid into a 10 episode series.

On stage, Ellroy will discuss his experience turning his work into audio entertainment. Ellroy is best known for writing L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia and some of the greatest crime novels of the past century.

Attend!

Leading independent podcast studio Audio Up has reunited with James Ellroy, “the Demon Dog of American Literature,” to adapt his seminal novel of historical fiction, American Tabloid, into a 12-episode scripted series. The book, which forms the basis of his Underworld USA Trilogy, tells the fictional story of JFK's murder from the point of view of those who killed him. The cast of characters is a rogue's gallery of bloodthirsty Cuban exiles, rogue CIA operatives, mafia killers, pimps, shakedown men and FBI agents all chasing money, sex and power. The book blasts a bullet hole into the myth of American innocence and hope that pervaded the Eisenhower years and was exemplified by Kennedy's Camelot. In Ellroy's hands JFK is transmogrified into “Bad Back Jack,” an underhung playboy with a penchant for call girls, amphetamines, and the power derived from his father's money. It's RFK, in Ellroy's telling, who is the moral center, but seals his brother's fate and that of the family by chasing the mob and Jimmy Hoffa. Inserted into this milieu is a morphine addicted Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, the Chicago Outfit and a low- rent Twist queen who becomes their ticket to blackmail. They all converge in Dallas to rub up against History and watch the world spin. This is American history torched, and served up a la carte as the truth.

QUOTE FROM JAMES ELLROY

American Tabloid has been lauded over the years as Ellroy's masterwork of historical fiction, and has taken on near mythical status alongside Don Delillo's Libra as the best of the genre. But its massive scope and ambition has long eluded Hollywood in their attempts to tame and adapt the book. The list of suitors who have attempted to make American Tabloid, only to be defeated includes David Fincher, Bruce Willis, Tom Hanks, and countless studios who were lured by the siren song of the book's rat-a-tat-tat, Rat Pack allure, only to drown in the quicksand of the novel's massive scope. It seemed largely “unadaptable” until podcasting made it viable once again. Now, Audio Up has stepped into the fray to bring American Tabloid to listeners worldwide.

“Audio is the perfect medium to deliver American Tabloid,” says Audio Up's Chief Creative Officer, Jimmy Jellinek, who is set to adapt the series from the book alongside James Ellroy. We can build out the book's massive internal world through sound. Traveling from the jungles of Guatemala to Castro's Cuba, mid-century Chicago, Los Angeles, 1963 Dallas, and the Jim Crow south alongside these characters would be prohibitive – unless you were making a film on the scale of the first two Godfathers. Instead, we're creating what may very well be the first true, scripted epic of the podcast era for what it would cost to feed the grips for half a day on one of these sets. When were finished you'll hopefully know we're the HBO or 70's Paramount of Audio, full stop. The fact that James has entrusted his legacy to Audio Up is enormously gratifying and speaks volumes to the way we work with other people's IP.”

American Tabloid will debut July 4th 2022, and will be executive produced by Audio Up's Phil Alberstat, Jared Gutstadt and Jimmy Jellinek. Casting to begin immediately.

Dig:

It's coming. He's coming. He'll be hot on the heels of his noxious new novel, Widespread Panic, pandemically published June 15 by Alfred A. Knopf. James Ellroy's Hollywood Death Trip is baaaaaaad to the be-bop bone!!! It will lash listeners and lay them low!!!!! El Jefe Ellroy's time-tripping back to hellacious Hollyweird, the delirious demimonde that formed the fount of his licentious literary vision. He'll nuke-bomb narrate his best true-crime pieces. They will surgingly circumscribe mid-century L.A. and set it aflame. Sin-sational murder cases, mellifluous music, and socko sound effects. Man, it's rip-roaring radio at its boffo best!!!!

The Karyn Kupcinet case. The Stephanie Gorman snuff. Winter '76 – Sicko Sal Mineo is slashed outside his Sunset Strip love lair. A lurid leap back to '58, as Ellroy gives us the furtive 411 on his own mother's murder.

“Nothing moves the needle in this medium like true crime. To work with The Master himself to create a first-of-its-kind series that harkens back to the golden age of tabloid radio is a dream come true.” So sez Audio Up's Chief Creative Officer, Jimmy Jellinek.

“James Ellroy's first-ever podcast series is the perfect addition to our growing slate of prestige programming. Ellroy and true crime is a match made in Heaven.” So sez Audio Up founder and CEO Jared Gutstadt.

“Summer '21 is the soil-your-soul season of the Demon Dog,” Ellroy sez. “I'm a rapacious reader of my own work, and I'm here to rip and revitalize radio – and run it raw. And that's no shivering shit, Daddy-O.”

Ellroy's Soil-Your-Soul summer fast approaches. Knopf publishes Widespread Panic early on. The Demon Dog's new novel features legendary Hollyweird fixer Freddy Otash, an ex-cop, shakedown artist, and strongarm goon for Confidential magazine. Panic panders to the sex-singed sinner in all of us – as it toasts and torches ‘50's Hollywood to the ground.

Bad-ass book to rock ‘em/sock ‘em radio – James Ellroy's Hollywood Death Trip debuts a few short weeks later.

“I've had precious few moments,” admitted the novelist James Ellroy, “where I've said to myself: ‘Ellroy, you are the king. You're the greatest crime writer that ever lived.'” A comment like that might be insufferable if it weren't delivered, as it was by Ellroy, with a grin and if it didn't also have a plausible claim on the truth. Ellroy's morally complex, baroquely plotted, sprawling and highly stylized novels — “The Black Dahlia” and “L.A. Confidential” chief among them — constitute a singularly intense body of work. In the 71-year-old's opinion, he has reached a new peak with his latest, “This Storm.” But he's not taking that as an invitation to coast. “The reflex kicks in,” Ellroy said, and it tells him: “You've got more work to do.”

Read the rest at “The New York Times Magazine”