I thought so

i love to read, although i really like fantasy books. lotr, the hobbit, forgotten realms, etc...haha

all the "geek" books :D

I enjoyed LOTR too.

You're not, It's been a few years since I picked up one of his books now, I never had much time for his political thrillers such as American Tabloid and now The Cold Six Thousand. I would recommend The Black Dahlia, Clandestine and the L.A. Noir Trilogy which are some of the best crime novels I've read.

Cool, cause have read The Black Dahlia, American Tabloid and Browns Requiem so far. I liked American Tabloid best, although its complexity borders on the chaotic. Usually not a good thing. At least for me it was hard to follow sometimes. Definetely not a book for the 30-minute-read before going to bed. The characters in the black dahlia acted a bit weird imo. And Ellroy is really weak when it comes to describing a love affair :-/

If you haven't read it, try "The Big Nowhere", best Ellroy's book imo (if you're into real black, dark police stories).

Elroy is really a political writer and a fierce critic of the government of his country and its agencies and the ideology they deploy to maintain themselves in power. Among other things, he wants to unmask the myth of the 1950s as happy, golden age of family stability, secure communities with shared values and universal prosperity based on the constructive development of new technology. (To have a sense of the falsity of the comforting myth, just think of the irony involved in the hugely successful Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies.)

Instead, his characters are driven by self-delusion (the naïve), material greed, a craving for immediate personal gratification regardless of consequences and a lust for power over individuals and institutions. The implied argument (I think) is that the social problems of the contemporary US are a product of the acts of the dynamic men of the 1950s (usually portrayed as heroes) rather than the free-loving, dope-smoking, peace-promoting hippies of the 1960s. It’s a bit much to expect him to provide sincerely written romantic interludes in the midst of all that. Besides, his central characters are self-aware and cynical of others (or least try to be): even when they fall in love, they suspect they’re making fools of themselves. However, some characters find redemption (when they don’t shoot themselves or have someone else do it for them).

I tried to give someone a sense of what I thought was his moral purpose as a writer and described him as a Marvel comic version of Graham Greene; it’s a poor analogy in many areas, but it says something about how he treats relations between grown-up men and women.

Why that analysis is probably better than anything Ellroy has ever written. One might add, that his staccato style of writing shows a lack of economy, since he uses it all the time, weakening its potential as a powerful stilistic element.

But I have also the feeling, that there is no ironic distance between Ellroy and his characters. When he describes a romantic relationship towards a woman in the black dahlia, he tries to break up the cynical view to reveal a caring man. I suspect, Ellroy himself is not really capable of describing such delicate things.

Ah, the seductions of flattery. Elroy is a serious writer who deliberately chooses to work within the boundaries established by two closely related strands of specifically American fiction. The first is the long tradition of realist representations of experience of the physical world in which mental and emotional responses are implied rather than explored. Hemingway is the archetype, but the list is long and exclusively masculine: it is deliberately gendered writing of ‘men without women’, even when women are present. I think most of Thom Jones’ stories show that this is a line of creative enquiry that is far from played out. The other American tradition is of writers learning their trade in pulp fiction (typically crime stories) and transcending the limits of what the genre typically allows to be said. Chandler is the model here, but there are tens of others.

My reading of The Black Dahlia is completely the reverse of yours. He was inspired to write the story by the unsolved murder of his mother. It was the story he had always wanted to write, the end for which he started writing and learned the discipline of being a professional crime writer. I think it was a profoundly emotional book for him work on and he has repressed his feelings to an extent that curtails a rounded psychological description (however artificial that is in fiction) of the characters involved. Working in genre fiction allowed him to contemplate the facts and the unknowns that had coloured his whole life and development while removing his own tearful, bereft little boy ego from the story. (However, I think the traces are still there in the text, but that’s an argument of close reading.) You read him as struggling to incorporate emotion into the mechanistic text, I see him as vainly trying to turn his eyes away from it while nailing his sentences to the framework of facts. In either case, the result is a flawed work, but I think it is the struggle and the tension it creates in the writing that gives the book its quality.

well LA Confidential is a pretty awesome movie =)