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Dennis Lehane on Perfidia:

Few writers, once established in the public consciousness, have changed their style as drastically as James Ellroy. In his early days, Ellroy wandered through the boneyards of 1980s pulp, channeling Jim Thompson and Dashiell Hammett before he found his own voice with a trilogy of contemporary novels about a troubled, racist genius cop named Lloyd Hopkins. Hopkins was morally despicable in the day-to-day, but compared with the monsters he fought in the neon-drench of underworld Los Angeles, he was quasi-­angelic. When Ellroy closed out the Hopkins trilogy with ‘Suicide Hill’ in 1986, he shuttered his interest in topical culture as well and moved into the second incarnation of his career, that of the wildly romantic yet increasingly bilious chronicler of Los Angeles in the years immediately following World War II.

Novelist James Ellroy prides himself on living in the past, and sometimes his obsessive backward gazing pays off. One lonely Saturday night a few years back, he stood at his window in the Ravenswood — the Art Deco apartment on Rossmore Avenue best known for Mae West’s longtime residency — and had a vision.

A song about betrayal evokes Los Angeles in the 1940s for the author of The Black Dahlia.

a sprawling, uncompromising epic of crime and depravity, with admirable characters few and far between.

‘It’s the best book I’ve ever written,’ he says with his characteristic literary bravado. ‘It’s more wholesome, more accessible, more human and has more of my heart and soul than all of my other books combined. This book is much more tied to an actual historical event, both the internment camps and the first months of World War II. But I’m rewriting L.A. history to my own specifications. It’s like your dog — she’s always marking her turf, right? That’s what I’m doing. I’m pissing, leaving my mark. I’m creating a secret human infrastructure of big, public events.’

— title: “Days that Will Live in Infamy: PW Talks with James Ellroy” date: 2014-07-25T17:48:00.000Z published: true featured: false categories: [“Interview”] source: “Publishers Weekly” link_to_original: “http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/63436-days-that-will-live-in-infamy-pw-talks-with-james-ellroy.html" related_book: "” description: “Days that Will Live in Infamy: PW Talks with James Ellroy” description: “Days that Will Live in Infamy: PW Talks with James Ellroy”

Walkabout - James Ellroy from Ed Knigge on Vimeo.

_Interviewed by Nathaniel Rich at _The Paris Review__

Reading James Ellroy’s novels, it’s tempting to imagine the sixty-one-year-old author as a hyperactive, shotgun-toting, trash-talking connoisseur of crime, women, and American history, the kind of guy who pals around with homicide detectives and wears fedoras and bespoke suits. This portrait, as it turns out, is entirely accurate—except for the attire. These days he favors ivy caps and Hawaiian shirts.