James Ellroy

James Ellroy , of his true name Lee Earle Ellroy , (born the March 4th 1948 with Los Angeles in California) is a writer of whodunnit S American.

Biography

James Ellroy was born the March 4th 1948 from a father Comptable 50 years and from a mother Infirmière of German origin . His/her parents divorce six years later. His/her mother obtains the guard of small. This one is ten years old, when its family moves in popular quarters of Los Angeles. James is already an enthusiastic reader of police literature.

Jean Ellroy, his mother, is assassinated the June 22nd 1958. The assassin will never be stopped. James is entrusted to a benevolent father, but Ellroy is delivered to itself. It will sink little by little in the delinquency. It becomes acquainted with Randy Rice in 1961. They are two little scoundrels who will make the four hundred blows, sharing their taste for the black girls and novels.

James Ellroy is made return college. Whereas the health of his/her father is degraded, Ellroy engages in the Armée in 1965. The father will succumb quickly of a Heart attack. Its death marks the beginning of a slow descent into Hell. Ellroy is made reform army, it finds his friend Randy and dark with him in the consumption of alcohol and Drogue.

Ellroy saw more than ten years without residence, of odd jobs, of larcenies, sleeping in the parks, being introduced among people, less to burglarize (it flies of the underclothing, alcohol, grass, the credit cards), that to feel the big chill, he will declare later.

In 1975, a Abcès with the lung makes it give up the abuses poisons. It breaks the vicious circle in which it was locked up. It becomes caddie of Golf to Los Angeles and begins more arranged life. In 1978, it takes as a starting point its experiment of caddie to pose the basic screen of a first novel: Brown' S Requiem , published in 1981. It continues with Clandestin (1982), then book its series of “Lloyd Hopkins” (1984 - 1986), which it closes before term, publishing only three books out of five envisaged initially.

It publishes then a killer on the road which is the account with the first nobody of the course of a " serial killer". This work became one of the major references of the schools of training of police officers so much it describes with precision the psychology of the major part of the serial killers.

It launches out afterwards in the writing of the book which will make known to him the celebrity: the Black Dahlia , which is a work of fiction based on a legendary true story of Los Angeles of the Forties, namely the most sadistic murder bloodiest and that the city knew; murder of a young starlet, Elizabeth Short, which was called the black dahlia by the press and which solved forever. James Ellroy seems to have used this history to start to exorcize the memory of the murder of his own mother who took place approximately 10 years after the black dahlia.

He will write after three other novels having for framework the town of Los Angeles in the Années 1940 - 1950 and for topic the crime and corruption. It is about: Large Nowhere the , L.A. Confidential and White Jazz (some of the characters of the Quartet appear already in Clandestin ).

Always obsessed by the history of his mother it will try to solve, nearly 40 years after the facts, the murder of his mother with the assistance of a police officer of L.A. to the retirement (Bill Stoner). It will be the occasion for him to recall the course of his/her mother since her childhood with it and to reconcile themselves with it and thus with a share of him even. He will write the account in an autobiographical book of it: My share of shade .

He is presented in the form of an alive hermit in isolation to prevent that the universe of its novels, which occur in the Années 1940 to 1970, is disturbed by the contemporary world.

After having fled its native and lived Los Angeles with New York, Kansas City, it returns to live in Los Angeles as from 2006.

James Ellroy is now one of the most popular authors of Roman black American. He published more than fifteen novels in twenty years. He speaks without concession about his difficult years in Destination mortuary .

While waiting for the third and last volume of the trilogy Underworld the U.S.A. (not of official date), the Payot Editions & Rivages publish in October 2007 two works: a test reactualized on Ellroy (already published in 1992) and Tijuana my love , which contains the news Tijuana my love , two news published in the American version of Destination: mortuary! as well as articles published by the American magazine GQ between September 1998 and July 2002.

Work

The style of Ellroy continues by a raw and acid verbal inventiveness, depicting with roughness the dark recesses of the american company. The black literature is a critical space made profitable by the authors to develop ambivalent worlds, complex characters with the fuzzy Moralité S, accounts Politique S and sights sociological. Ellroy does not derogate from the rule.

Following the example Melville retranscribing the vocabulary of the sailors of its time and using it in its Moby Dick , Ellroy takes again with an astonishing precision the common expressions of the police officers and the underworld of the years 1950 and 1960. It is a titanic work enriched by scrupulous references. It is interested particularly in the structures and the operation of the State like to its police practices. Its novels cover a historical dimension, in particular in American Tabloïd and its continuation, American Death Trip . The third novel of this trilogy Underworld the U.S.A. will not be called finally more Police Gazette .

James Ellroy, during his career, took as a starting point the pioneers of the black novel such Raymond Chandler, author of the Big Sleep , to which echo its Big Nowhere makes.

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