James Ellroy
All Books By James Ellroy
Because the Night
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 9 hours 52 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2010
- Language: English
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3.51(1214 ratings)
Three citizens are butchered during a liquor store holdup. An unstable veteran cop vanishes without a trace. Nothing connects these events except for a nagging hunch in the back of Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins’ brain–a sinister foreboding that will lead him through the sin-and-sleaze playground of nighttime LA on the trail of a psycho psychiatrist with a talent for terror and mind-control. His gore-soaked journey through hell will plunge this determined manhunter into the dark heart of madness–and beyond.
... Read moreBlood on the Moon
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 8 hours 44 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2010
- Language: English
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3.45(1871 ratings)
Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins can’t stand music, or any loud sounds. He’s got a beautiful wife, but he can’t get enough of other women. And instead of bedtime stories, he regales his daughters with bloody crime stories. He’s a thinking man’s cop with a dark past and an obsessive drive to hunt down monsters who prey on the innocent. Now, there’s something haunting him. He sees a connection in a series of increasingly gruesome murders of women committed over a period of twenty years. To solve the case, Hopkins will dump all the rules and risk his career to make the final link and get the killer.
... Read moreBlood’s A Rover
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: Craig Wasson
- Length: 26 hours 14 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2009
- Language: English
Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian countermeasures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History.
Dwight Holly is J. Edgar Hoover’s pet strong-arm goon, implementing Hoover’s racist designs and obsessed with a leftist shadow figure named Joan Rosen Klein. Wayne Tedrow—ex-cop and heroin runner—is building a mob gambling mecca in the Dominican Republic and quickly becoming radicalized. Don Crutchfield is a window-peeping kid private-eye within tantalizing reach of right-wing assassins, left-wing revolutionaries and the powermongers of an incendiary era. Their lives collide in pursuit of the Red Goddess Joan—and each of them will pay “a dear and savage price to live History.”
Political noir as only James Ellroy can write it—our recent past razed and fully reconstructed—Blood’s A Rover is a novel of astonishing depth and scope, a massive tale of corruption and retribution, of ideals at war and the extremity of love. It is the largest and greatest work of fiction from an American master.
... Read moreBrown’s Requiem
- By: James Ellroy
- Length: 9 hours 25 minutes
- Publisher: Highbridge Company
- Publish date: June 05, 2012
- Language: English
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3.53(2638 ratings)
In the tradition of Chandler and Wambaugh, the author of The Black Dahlia brilliantly evokes the dark underside of Los Angeles. When P.I. Fritz Brown undertakes an investigation into blood money changing hands at a golf course, he plunges into a nightmare of arson, corruption, and porn.
... Read moreClandestine
- By: James Ellroy
- Length: 12 hours 27 minutes
- Publisher: Highbridge Company
- Publish date: March 05, 2013
- Language: English
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3.73(4029 ratings)
Destination: Morgue!
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: Craig Wasson
- Length: 10 hours 33 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2022
- Language: English
Dig. The Demon Dog gets down with a new book of scenes from America’s capital of kink: Los Angeles. Fourteen pieces, some fiction, some nonfiction, all true enough to be admissible as state’s evidence, and half of it in print for the first time. And every one of them bearing the James Ellroy brand of mayhem, machismo, and hollow-nose prose.
Here are Mexican featherweights and unsolved-murder vics, crooked cops and a very clean D.A. Here is a profile of Hollywood’s latest celebrity perp-walker, Robert Blake, and three new novellas featuring a demented detective with an obsession with a Hollywood actress. And, oh yes, just maybe the last appearance of Hush-Hush sleaze-monger Danny Getchell. Here’s Ellroy himself, shining a 500-watt Mag light into all the dark places of his life and imagination. Destination: Morgue! puts the reader’s attention in a hammerlock and refuses to let go.
... Read moreHollywood Nocturnes
- By: James Ellroy
- Length: 6 hours 19 minutes
- Publisher: Highbridge Company
- Publish date: July 09, 2013
- Language: English
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3.76(2587 ratings)
L.A. Confidential
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: David Strathairn
- Length: 3 hours 0 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2007
- Language: English
Christmas 1951, Los Angeles: a city where the police are as corrupt as the criminals.
Six prisoners are beaten senseless in their cells by cops crazed on alcohol. For the three L. A. P. D. detectives involved, it will expose the guilty secrets on which they have built their corrupt and violent careers.
... Read moreL.A. Confidential
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: Craig Wasson
- Length: 17 hours 33 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2015
- Language: English
Christmas 1951, Los Angeles: a city where the police are as corrupt as the criminals.
Six prisoners are beaten senseless in their cells by cops crazed on alcohol. For the three L. A. P. D. detectives involved, it will expose the guilty secrets on which they have built their corrupt and violent careers.
... Read moreMy Dark Places
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: Michael Prichard
- Length: 14 hours 28 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2019
- Language: English
The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy presents another literary masterpiece, this time a true crime murder mystery about his own mother.
In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother–and himself.
In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten–and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.
... Read morePerfidia
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: Craig Wasson
- Length: 28 hours 5 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2014
- Language: English
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
It is December 6, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal Japanese-Americans—but now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins.
The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. William H. Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police Department. He’s superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up, and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith—Irish émigré, ex-IRA killer, fledgling war profiteer. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. Kay Lake is a twenty-one-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. The investigation throws them together and rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm center that brilliantly illuminates these four driven souls—comrades, rivals, lovers, history’s pawns.
Perfidia is a novel of astonishments. It is World War II as you have never seen it, and Los Angeles as James Ellroy has never written it before. Here, he gives us the party at the edge of the abyss and the precipice of America’s ascendance. Perfidia is that moment, spellbindingly captured. It beckons us to solve a great crime that, in its turn, explicates the crime of war itself. It is a great American novel.
Suicide Hill
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 9 hours 29 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2009
- Language: English
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3.54(1136 ratings)
In disgrace after a badly handled arrest in New Orleans, Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins is assigned as a liaison officer to an FBI investigation into a series of diabolical and clever bank robberies. Three men have done their homework: they choose bank managers who are having affairs, kidnap their girlfriends, and force the managers to open the banks early. When the bank robbers turn violent, Hopkins finds himself with a bit of information he would rather not have–information about police corruption that reaches into the office of his sworn enemy Fred Gaffney, head of the Internal Affairs Division.
... Read moreThe Big Nowhere
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: Jason Culp
- Length: 16 hours 35 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: September 15, 2015
- Language: English
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4.09(13960 ratings)
(100,000 words)
... Read moreThe Black Dahlia
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 13 hours 54 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2006
- Language: English
Bonus feature includes an original afterword by James Ellroy, titled “Hillikers,” read by Stephen Hoye.
On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia–and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history.
Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard. Both are obsessed with the Dahlia–driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl’s twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches–into a region of total madness.
... Read moreThe Cold Six Thousand
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: Craig Wasson
- Length: 24 hours 18 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2001
- Language: English
The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz, American Tabloid… James Ellroy’s high-velocity, best-selling novels have redefined noir for our age, propelling us within inches of the dark realities of America’s recent history. Now, in The Cold Six Thousand, his most ambitious and explosive novel yet, he puts the whole of the 1960s under his blistering lens. The result is a work of fierce, epic fiction, a speedball through our most tumultuous time.
It begins in Dallas. November 22, 1963. The heart of the American Dream detonated.
Wayne Tedrow Jr., a young Vegas cop, arrives with a loathsome job to do. He’s got $6,000 in cash and no idea that he is about to plunge into the cover-up conspiracy already brewing around Kennedy’s assassination, no idea that this will mark the beginning of a hellish five-year ride through the private underbelly of public policy.
Ellroy’s furiously paced narrative tracks Tedrow’s ride: Dallas back to Vegas, with the Mob and Howard Hughes, south with the Klan and J. Edgar Hoover, shipping out to Vietnam and returning home, the bearer of white powder, plotting new deaths as 1968 approaches …
Tedrow stands witness, as the icons of an iconic era mingle with cops, killers, hoods, and provocateurs. His story is ground zero in Ellroy’s stunning vision: historical confluence as American Nightmare.
The Cold Six Thousand is a masterpiece.
... Read moreThe Hilliker Curse
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: James Ellroy
- Length: 7 hours 43 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2010
- Language: English
The legendary crime writer gives us a raw, brutally candid memoir—as high intensity and as riveting as any of his novels—about his obsessive search for “atonement in women.”
The year was 1958. Jean Hilliker had divorced her fast-buck hustler husband and resurrected her maiden name. Her son, James, was ten years old. He hated and lusted after his mother and “summoned her dead.” She was murdered three months later.
The Hilliker Curse is a predator’s confession, a treatise on guilt and on the power of malediction, and above all, a cri de cœur. James Ellroy unsparingly describes his shattered childhood, his delinquent teens, his writing life, his love affairs and marriages, his nervous breakdown, and the beginning of a relationship with an extraordinary woman who may just be the long-sought Her.
A layered narrative of time and place, emotion and insight, sexuality and spiritual quest, The Hilliker Curse is a brilliant, soul-baring revelation of self. It is unlike any memoir you have ever read.
... Read moreThis Storm
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: Craig Wasson
- Length: 14 hours 26 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2019
- Language: English
January ’42. L.A. reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese residents are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city.
A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops tag it a routine dead-man job. They’re wrong. It’s an early-warning signal of Chaos.
There’s a murderous fire and a gold heist. There’s Fifth Column treason on American soil. There are homegrown Nazis, Commies, and race racketeers. It’s populism ascendant. There’s two dead cops in a dive off the jazz-club strip. And three men and one woman have a hot date with history.
Elmer Jackson is a corrupt Vice cop. He’s a flesh peddler and a bagman for the L.A. Chief of Police. Hideo Ashida is a crime-lab whiz, lashed by anti-Japanese rage. Dudley Smith is PD hardnose working Army Intelligence. He’s gone rogue and gone all-the-way fascist. Joan Conville was born rogue. She’s a defrocked Navy lieutenant and a war profiteer to her core.
L.A. ’42. Homefront madness. Wartime inferno–This Storm is James Ellroy’s most audacious novel yet. It is by turns savage, tender, elegiac. It lays bare and celebrates crazed Americans of all stripes. It is a masterpiece.
... Read moreWhite Jazz
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: Jerry Orbach
- Length: 2 hours 56 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2007
- Language: English
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.
... Read moreWhite Jazz
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: Scott Brick
- Length: 15 hours 31 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2007
- Language: English
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.
... Read moreWidespread Panic
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrator: Craig Wasson
- Length: 12 hours 17 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
From the modern master of noir comes a novel based on the real-life Hollywood fixer Freddy Otash, the malevolent monarch of the 1950s L.A. underground, and his Tinseltown tabloid Confidential magazine.
Freddy Otash was the man in the know and the man to know in ‘50s L.A. He was a rogue cop, a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp—and, most notably, the head strong-arm goon for Confidential magazine.
Confidential presaged the idiot internet—and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink, and the scurrilous skank. It mauled misanthropic movie stars, sex-soiled socialites, and putzo politicians. Mattress Jack Kennedy, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson—Frantic Freddy outed them all. He was the Tattle Tyrant who held Hollywood hostage, and now he’s here to CONFESS.
“I’m consumed with candor and wracked with recollection. I’m revitalized and resurgent. My meshugenah march down memory lane begins NOW.”
In Freddy’s viciously entertaining voice, Widespread Panic torches 1950s Hollywood to the ground. It’s a blazing revelation of coruscating corruption, pervasive paranoia, and of sin and redemption with nothing in between.
Here is James Ellroy in savage quintessence. Freddy Otash confesses—and you are here to read and succumb.