When he was ten, Ellroy’s mother was murdered, it remains an unsolved crime and it galvanized an already burgeoning fascination with crime solving and police work, he says. … history always eludes me and so I keep going back and going back and going back.” “That's me, I am the dog chasing the cat, and the cat is history and the cat always keeps eluding me. I was always on this stuff like a dog chasing a cat. “Way back in 1956, when I was seven or eight years old, my parents had a big closet filled with Life magazines and I was always in there with my little boy snout looking at the pictures, stuck to the pages, reading the stories of World War II, the Korean War, the anti-crime commissions that went after the mob, the government investigating committees that went after the communists. Living in, and writing about, the past is “emotionally rewarding,” Ellroy says.
“You throw them up against history and they have to change because history mandates that they do and damned if you don't have yourself a hell of a story.” “I love the big romantic canvas and so I go back and plot and plan and I juxtapose history against tumultuous love stories and fictional police investigations and every three and a half or four years I write a very big book.”ĭrama, Ellroy says, to him it always boils down to man meets woman. I love the holy and unholy conjunction of men and women. I love bad men in love with strong women.
He returns to themes in his writing that have always fascinated him, he says. “I've never used a computer for anything, I don't have a cell phone, I'm computer illiterate, I write these massive books of mine by hand. World War II, the post-war era, government investigating committees, anti-crime commissions, the totality of crime itself. “Even when I was a little kid I was fixated on the past. You've got cop killings, you've got hopped up jazz musicians, you've got corrupt cops, you've got the spectre of Japanese sea and air attack on defense plants in Los Angeles and you've got rogue cops working army intelligence in Mexico.”Įllroy says his historical novels spring from the fact that his “heart has always belonged to the past". You've got crazy Japanese devil worshippers. “You've got the Fifth Column traitors Nazis and Communists. It's been followed up with Ellroy’s latest novel This Storm.Įllroy told Kathryn Ryan This Storm is “the greatest police novel ever written by an American”. Perfidia is a 32-day, pacy, unfolding narrative beginning with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Listen to the full interview with James Ellroy
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