James Ellroy

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Obsessed with crime drama? From the makers of Total Film and SFX comes brand new quarterly magazine Crime Scene, celebrating the very best in crime on TV and in books and film

Brand new crime magazine bags exclusive Sherlock stuff, James Ellroy, Steven Moffat on Columbo and much more…

The issue with the Ellroy interview isn’t available online, but there are print and digital editions.

The Gutter of Babel

Perfidia will be published in Poland in September, Hungary in October, and Greece in early 2016.

Is True Detective season 2 a James Ellroy rip-off?

“The second series of HBO's acclaimed drama True Detective has met a lukewarm reception from fans since airing in June; now viewers are accusing it of borrowing some of its distinctive features from the crime writer James Ellroy.

A Reddit thread begun on July 11 points out many alleged similarities of the show to the work of Los Angeles-based author James Ellroy, specifically his four novels known as the ‘LA Quartet', the best known of which is 1990’s L.A. Confidential, which was made into a 1997 film starring Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger.

See Los Angeles’ Rough Past With Crime Author James Ellroy

“It was 1953. Eisenhower was in the white house. The New York Yankees won the World Series for the fifth year consecutively. The theme music for the television series, “Dragnet,” rose to the top of the Billboard charts. It was also the year that Los Angeles had a record number of homicides—and more than twice as many suicides.”

We Talked to the Godfather of Crime Fiction, James Ellroy, About the Dark Days of the LAPD

“We called up Ellroy at the Los Angeles Police Museum where the author, who speaks with same shit-talking, machine-gun wit as his characters, was in pugnacious form. We asked him whether poring over sixty-year-old photos of mutilated corpses got his creative juices flowing, whether LA is still a ‘perv zone' and if he really thinks that the American police can go on without reform after the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and so many others.”

NOIR CITY 6—James Ellroy Intro to Dalton Trumbo Doublebill

“With arms akimbo and legs planted firmly apart, James Ellroy delivered a hardboiled (and hilarious!) introduction to Noir City’s doublebill of ‘Gun Crazy' (1950) and ‘The Prowler' (1951), both written by the infamously-blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Not only is Trumbo the uncredited screenwriter on The Prowler—screened at Noir City in a sprarkling new restoration print—but his voice can be heard as the voice of John Gilvray, the night-time radio DJ.”

True Crime

“1953 was a hell of a year for the Los Angeles Police Department. The bodies piled up: liquor store robberies gone bad, crazed spouses and cheating lovers, gang wars, back alley brawls and straight-up, cold-blooded killing. This was a decade that saw L.A.'s population boom, with suburban migration creating an inner-city vacuum that sucked in the worst elements. Those left behind who remained on the right side of the law, and the well-to-do in the new neighbourhoods trying to beat back danger on their doorsteps, relied on the LAPD to meet fire with fire…”

R.J. Cutler Takes On James Ellroy Memoir My Dark Places

EXCLUSIVE: RJ Cutler, the maker of documentaries The September Issue and The World According to Dick Cheney who stepped into narrative film with If I Stay, has signed on to direct and co-write My Dark Places. That's the memoir by L.A. Confidential author James Ellroy that focuses on the 1958 murder of his mother and Ellroy's attempt to re-investigate some 36 years later, in 1994.

Also note coverage in “The Dissolve.”

Win a Perfidia signed screen print

To celebrate the release of Perfidia, the latest crime noir novel from the creator of L.A Confidential, James Ellroy, we've got 5 exclusive screen printed posters of the original cover artwork signed by the author to give away! If that wasn't enough, we're also throwing in 5 paperback copies of the novel just in time for the summer holidays.