James Ellroy (born March 4, 1948 in Los Angeles, California) is one of the world's best-selling crime writers and essayists with a unique "telegraphic" writing style, which omits words other writers would consider necessary. His books are noted for their dark humor and depiction of American authoritarianism.

In 1958, his mother, Geneva, was murdered in El Monte, where she and Ellroy moved three years after her divorce from his father, Armand. The unsolved killing, and a birthday present from his father a few months later, The Badge by Jack Webb, about the Los Angeles Police Department were pivotal moments in his life as portrayed in My Dark Places.

He writes longhand on legal pads, rather than on a computer, and prepares elaborate outlines for his books that are several hundred pages long. In connection with The Cold Six Thousand Ellroy has said that he is through with "genre fiction" and plans to write mainstream novels.

Ellroy lives in Carmel with his wife, Helen Knode, author of the 2003 novel The Ticket Out.

Films

• 1995 Shotgun Freeway
• 2001 James Ellroy's Feast of Death

Bibliography

• 1981 Brown's Requiem
• 1982 Clandestine
• 1984 Blood on the Moon
• 1984 Because the Night
• 1985 Suicide Hill
• 1986 Killer on the Road (also published as Silent Terror )
• 1987 The Black Dahlia
• 1988 The Big Nowhere
• 1990 L.A. Confidential
• 1992 White Jazz
• 1994 Hollywood Nocturnes
• 1995 American Tabloid
• 1996 My Dark Places
• 1999 Killer on the Road
• 2001 The Cold Six Thousand
• 2004