Conversations with James Ellroy

Interview: James Ellroy

125 Interview: James Ellroy Keith Phipps/2004 From The A.V. Club (December 1, 2004). Reprinted by permission of Keith Phipps. James Ellroy is a man with few secrets. After spending his early years drifting from one sordid situation to another following his mother’s still-unsolved 1958 murder, he beat back a handful of addictions in the ’70s, found steady employment as a caddie, and began writing. His autobiographical work—most memorably My Dark Places, his 1996 memoir/true-crime account of his mother’s death—is unflinchingly honest, and he brings the same unblinking directness to the bad guys and the clay-footed heroes of his crime fiction. Early efforts like Brown’s Requiem and Killer on the Road earned him a cult following, but he didn’t truly find his voice until 1987’s The Black Dahlia, a fictionalized account of a famous Hollywood murder that bore similarities to the death of Ellroy’s mother. The Black Dahlia initiated an overlapping series Ellroy dubbed his L.A. Quartet. The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential (adapted as a hit film in 1997), and White Jazz followed, advancing Ellroy’s shadow history of postwar Los Angeles and further paring down his prose to a telegraphic essence. With its completion, Ellroy launched the still-in-progress Underworld U.S.A. trilogy with 1995’s American Tabloid, which blew his often-nightmarish vision of a world driven by brutish men and shady assignations up to a national scale with a story that culminated in the J.F.K. assassination. Between that book and 2001’s equally massive The Cold Six Thousand, Ellroy filled his time with screenwriting projects, the occasional piece of short fiction, and short pieces of nonfiction, mostly for G.Q. While working on the final Underworld U.S.A. installment, Ellroy recently released Destination: Morgue!, an anthology of autobiographical sketches, three linked novellas, and journalism that revisits unsolved murders, celebrity trials, and his own past, topics touched on in a recent conversation with The Onion A.V. Club. 126 CONVERSATIONS WITH JAMES ELLROY Interviewer: Apart from autobiographical work, what opportunities does nonfiction present to you that fiction can’t? Ellroy: I get to go back to Los Angeles, my smog-bound fatherland, and indulge my curiosity in unsolved murders of women, and do things like read the Stephanie Gorman file for that [Destination: Morgue!] piece, “Stephanie .” Ilena Silverman, now at the New York Times Magazine, got me to write the piece on Gary Graham. She wanted me to write a piece on the death penalty and explore the case of someone who might have been dubiously convicted, although 85 percent of me thinks that Gary Graham was guilty. Art Cooper suggested “I’ve Got the Goods,” about tabloid journalism. I’ve utilized tabloid journalism in the ’50s in my fiction. There was also the piece on the creative process, “Where I Get My Weird Shit,” and the further autobiographical piece, “My Life as a Creep,” originally entitled “Beaver Man.” Can’t get everything you want, kid. Interviewer: You’re back in California now, right? Ellroy: Yeah, I live on the Monterey Peninsula. Interviewer: You’ve effusively praised Kansas City. It seemed to suit you. Why leave? Ellroy: The fuckin’ heat drove me out of there. Very hot a third of the year. Monterey’s beautiful: It’s temperate, right on the ocean. Interviewer: It was never the need to flee L.A. that drove you out? Ellroy: I wanted to be somewhere else. At the time, I wanted to move east. That was in ’81, around the time my first novel was published. I had never been anywhere but L.A. It was time to move. Interviewer: Do you think having been born and raised there, and not having left for so long, gives you a perspective that other L.A. writers don’t have? Ellroy: I can write about L.A. wherever I happen to find myself, but I made a conscious decision after my L.A. Quartet books that I wouldn’t utilize L.A. as the strict locale of my novel-length fiction. Hence American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand were set throughout all of America. I was lucky to be born there, I stayed there for many years, and I like going back periodically, but I couldn’t live there. Interviewer: Do you find yourself at a disadvantage when you’re writing about New York, or Chicago...