The author of LA Confidential and Black Dahlia on falling in love with a murder victim, not owning a computer and his new true-crime podcast series
James Ellroy, 74, is a crime writer known for his hard-boiled noir novels and true crime essays. Feted for his “LA quartet” of novels, which includes The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential, and his “Underworld USA” series examining US political corruption, many of Ellroy’s obsessions (murder, crime, politics, masculinity) have been influenced by the unsolved 1958 murder of his mother, Geneva Hilliker. Recently, he released two books from his “Second LA Quartet” – Perfidia (2014) and The Storm (2019) – which begin with Pearl Harbour and take place during the second world war. Ellroy has a new podcast, James Ellroy’s Hollywood Death Trip, which features him reading several of his true-crime essays.
Let’s start with the podcast. You chose five stories including Stephanie from Destination: Morgue!, and Clash by Night from your Hollywood Reporter piece on the killing of Sal Mineo. Why those?
They’re crime, and they all take place in Hollywood. Couple of things. I’ve got a bass baritone voice, I’ve got a punchy voice, I can read dramatically. I’ve got a rat-a-tat journalistic style. And one can make the case that my mother’s unsolved 1958 murder, when I was 10 years old, is what got me hooked on crime… The podcast has been a joy, but as much as I dig this series, it’s nothing but a stalking horse for the full and unexpurgated version of my 1995 novel American Tabloid about John Kennedy’s reign. And that will go 12 hours with me narrating, and noted actors reading the dialogue.
