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Look alive—all you mofos out in cyberspace!!!! This is El Jefe Ellroy, your lunar-looped literary leader, writing to you from my pulsating pad in delirious Denver, Colorado. AND, I’m here to insidiously introduce my friends John “Son of Griff” Anderson and Grant “Wallflower” Nebel—two recidivistically rogue college professors whom I look upon as my bristling brain trust. This serves as my formal introduction to their dynamic dialogue on my new novel, This Storm. It’s my best book, fuckers, and Griff and Wallflower are feasting on it, like the pustulant pit bulls that they are!!!! Read their piece and gas on their purulent perceptions!!! Go out and buy noxiously numerous copies of This Storm!!!!!!!!!!

READ IT HERE

Ellroy

When do you read?

At night. When the world quiets down. When the hell hounds of my imagination stir in my bed beside me and grant me a few hours of repose.

Read the rest at the New York Times

One of the opening scenes of the 2001 BBC documentary Feast of Death, James Ellroy tells a story about his encounter with an elderly fan in a Kansas video store. She's effusive about how much she enjoyed the movie L.A. Confidential, which was based on Ellroy's bestselling novel of the same name — part of his now-iconic L.A. Quartet series.

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Dear Ellroy readers, enthusiasts, adherents, apparatchiks, and feckless followers worldwide:

Achtung, motherfuckers!!!!! Here's a day-by-day public-appearance itinerary for yours truly – the Demon Dog of American Literature!!! This is my British and U.S. schedule for the simultaneous publication of This Storm, my new novel, and of my L.A. Quartet and Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy – in the prongingly prestigious Everyman's Library perennial hardcover editions.

CLICK HERE TO FEAST YOUR EYES ON THESE GROOVY GIGS

For two weeks in the fall of 2017, best-selling author James Ellroy re-investigated the 1976 murder of Sal Mineo, the Oscar-nominated actor from Rebel Without a Cause who died at 37 in the carport outside his West Hollywood apartment. Together with Glynn Martin — a retired 20-year LAPD veteran — Ellroy pored over seven boxes of files at the L.A. Sheriff's Homicide Bureau that detailed more than two years of painstaking detective work leading to the arrest and conviction of Lionel Williams. “There was missing material,” says Ellroy. “We never saw the crime scene photographs, I put those together from descriptions.” And based on his decades of experience writing about crime in fiction (L.A. Confidential) and nonfiction (LAPD ‘53, co-authored with Martin), Ellroy extrapolated and “stitched together” what was missing to create this immersive version of events, told from the point of view of the detectives on the case.

SHERIFF'S HOMICIDE FILE #079200909-0977-011
Victim: Mineo, Salvatore/WM/37.
8567 Holloway Drive/West Hollywood.
2142 hours/Thursday/2-12-76.

Retrospective file summary and recalled narrative. We, the undersigned detectives attest:

Holloway ran short and cut diagonal, from La Cienega northwest to the Strip. One half mile, tops. Mid-rent apartment cribs and a big Catholic church. Film-biz habitues. Homosexuals and hip kids.

The above-stated address: Apartments. Postwar, stucco, three floors, a south-facing facade. Quick access to an alleyway carport.

An open carport.

The alleyway's narrow. The Park Wellington Towers are built up flush against it.

Read the rest at the Hollywood Reporter

Ellroy signs books for fans in front of the Egyptian Theater prior to his and Eddie Muller’s presentation of L.A. Confidential, as part of the Los Angeles 2018 Noir City Noir Film Festival.

From January 28th through February 2nd, Ellroy participated in numerous radio and television interviews in Madrid and Barcelona, Spain both to promote the new release there of the Spanish-language edition of My Dark Places. In Barcelona, Ellroy was presented with the prestigious Pepe Carvalho Award as part of the annual BCNegra celebration of crime fiction.

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“Crime fiction is the single biggest cultural export of America.” — @jamesellroy #BCNegra18

“Estimo als crítics quan ells m’estimen, i els odio quan ells m’odien. No m’interessa l’èxit, el que vull és escriure” — @jamesellroy.

“I love the critics when they love me, and I hate it when they hate me. I do not want success, what I want is to write” — @jamesellroy.

Barcelona looks like it belongs in a crime novel: winding, dark alleyways weave through historic, seedy neighborhoods. The Catalan capital has its fair share of grizzly mysteries in its past, but is also welcoming new ones – in the form of fiction, that is. This week kicked the city's festival dedicated to mystery books, BCNegra, which has already given out its highest award to a name you might recognize: James Ellroy.

Read the rest at Catalan News

The Fall 2017 issue of America, a Literary quarterly created by François Busnel, with an Ellroy interview. “America Like You've Never Read It.”

If you could play one fictional character from a novel on stage or screen, who would it be and why? And one real-life figure you first encountered in a work of nonfiction?

I still am young enough to play Dean Reed, the American who, starting in the 1960s, was considered to be a big American singing star, but only to the Communist world. He was famous in the Soviet Union and East Germany and all over the Communist world. He was an actor, made movies, and was both beloved (by many) and dismissed (by many), was crazy-making good-looking and traveled in the upper echelons of the red world. That life, and all that attention, made for an inevitable tragedy by the 1980s. But those that loved him as a friend loved him very much.

In the fiction world, I'd like a whack at James Ellroy's Lloyd Hopkins character—a cop who is such a genius the only work for him is police work. He is so smart and off-world in his abilities, the L.A.P.D. just sort of leaves him to poke around. A brilliant creation from the oh-so-complicated typing of Ellroy.

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