Ellroy.com: "James Ellroy (nee Lee Earle Ellroy) was born in Los Angeles [on this day] in 1948. His mother was a nurse and his father, when he did work, was an accountant, among other things.
When his parents divorced in 1954, his mother got custody and moved to El Monte (a low income area in L.A). His mother was murdered there in 1958. James Ellroy's attempt to solve this still unsolved murder was the subject of his 1996 nonfiction work My Dark Places. After his mother's death, he moved in with his father.
Ellroy claims to have been turned on to crime fiction by the Hardy Boys. At the age of ten, his father bought him Jack Webb's The Badge:a history of the LAPD. He became obsessed with the book and studied it repeatedly. In this book, he discovered the story of the Black Dahlia, as well as the cops and crime figures he would later write about in the L.A. Quartet."
3 comments:
I am a big fan of Ellroy. "The Badge" was republished as a paperback edition in 2005. I bought a copy and then my library received one of the originals as a donation.
Happy Birthday Ellroy. His talent is worth an applause. Good work.
kate rogers
Kool kard, Kate!
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