WRITER

James Ellroy

1948 - Today

James Ellroy

Lee Earle "James" Ellroy (born March 4, 1948) is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. Ellroy has become known for a telegrammatic prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences, and in particular for the novels The Black Dahlia (1987) and L.A. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of James Ellroy has received more than 1,710,179 page views. His biography is available in 36 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 32 in 2019). James Ellroy is the 1,873rd most popular writer (down from 1,565th in 2019), the 2,365th most popular biography from United States (down from 2,032nd in 2019) and the 209th most popular American Writer.

Memorability Metrics

1.7M
Page Views (PV)
56.66
Historical Popularity Index (HPI)
36
Languages Editions (L)
4.22
Effective Languages (L*)
3.64
Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Notable Works

My Dark Places

American Novelists, Mothers and sons, Murder

1996

White Jazz

Detective and mystery stories, Police corruption, Fiction

1991

The big nowhere

Crime, Fiction, Crime in fiction

The author of The Black Dahlia presents the powerful second novel in his L.A. Quartet. In The Big Nowhere, three men are caught up in a massive web of ambition, perversion and deceit. A remarkably vivid portrait of a remarkable time and place.

1988

The Black Dahlia

Fiction, Police in fiction, Murder in fiction

1987

American Tabloid

Fiction, Criminals, Political corruption

1995

L.A. confidential

Fiction, Crime, Ficción

*Classic LA Noir...terse dialogue, sharp characters and better than the movie.*

1990

The Big Nowhere

Crime, Fiction, Crime in fiction

The author of *The Black Dahlia* presents the powerful second novel in his L.A. Quartet. In *The Big Nowhere*, three men are caught up in a massive web of ambition, perversion and deceit. A remarkably vivid portrait of a remarkable time and place.

1988

American Tabloid

Political corruption, Fiction, Criminals

1995

L.A. Confidential

Fiction, Crime, Ficción

*Classic L.A. Noir... terse dialogue, sharp characters and better than the movie.*

1990

Because the Night

Fiction, Police, Psychiatrists

1986

The Black Dahlia

Detective and mystery fiction, hard-boiled, thrillers

The Black Dahlia is a roman noir on an epic scale: a classic period piece that provides a startling conclusion to America's most infamous unsolved murder mystery--the murder of the beautiful young woman known as The Black Dahlia.

1987

White Jazz

Detective and mystery stories, Police corruption, Fiction

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.

1991