My Dark Places

I enjoyed the first part of the book and then it kind of fell off for me. I got too lost in the writing style and the jumbled history of the writer. I unfortunately could not finish it.

Readers often wonder what makes their favorite writers tick--we want to point to a significant moment in their lives, a single event which made them become writers. When asked this question, most authors tend to shrug it off, saying that they were always compelled to write. James Ellroy would answer the question differently, because he knows the defining event of his personal life and writing career. It happened in 1958, when he was ten: his mother, Jean, was found murdered, a nylon stocking and a cotton cord lashed around her neck. Her corpse was found in an ivy patch near a high school, looking, as Ellroy himself describes it, "like a classic late night body dump." Despite a thorough investigation, her murderer was never found. When his mother died, Ellroy, the innocent victim of his parent's acrimonious divorce, was already well on the way to perfecting his "Crazy Man Act". Always somewhat of a misfit, Ellroy began to revel in his strangeness under his father's care. After his father's death seven years later, Ellroy spent the next thirteen years in a steep downward spiral, engaging in petty crime, serving jail time, and abusing drugs and alcohol. His only solace during this time were the wild fantasies he concocted in his head, and the crime novels which fueled those fantasies. During those decades, Ellroy struggled with the memory of "the redhead", as he often refers to his mother. Outwardly professing to hate her, he was confused by his true feelings. These repressed emotions produced a life long obsession with crime and crime fiction, which eventually surfaced in the recurring themes present in many of his novels. "Her death corrupted my imagination and gave me exploitable gifts." His writing, which allowed him to cope with his inner demons, eventually provided a means of reconciling with his mother--he would investigate her death, and attempt to find some answers to what had become the defining mystery of his own life. In 1994, Ellroy, at the urging of his future wife, decided to try to reopen his mother's police file. With the help of Bill Stoner, a 32 year veteran of the L. A. County Sheriff's Department, Ellroy conducted his own investigation of his mother's death, which ultimately failed to uncover any significant new leads. Although marked by some startling revelations, the investigation was hampered by the passage of time and the dimming memories of the parties involved. The investigation was not a total failure, however, because in trying to find the killer, Ellroy found his mother instead. Now, instead of a fantasy construct, Ellroy has a better idea of who the real Jean Ellroy was. Ellroy's failure to discover his mother's killer might bother some readers, but shouldn't. My Dark Places is, in the final analysis, Ellroy's attempt to reach out to his mother nearly forty years after her death, and as such, is eminently successful. By writing this memoir, Ellroy resurrects "the redhead" for a brief moment, just long enough to co

Ellroy is an internationally best-selling crime author (L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia, etc.). He also grew out of true crime--his mother Jean Ellroy was assaulted, murdered, and had her body dumped in a ditch in 1958, when James was 10 years old. James's father poisoned him against his mother, portraying her as a drunken whore. The boy grew up a troublemaker and serious addict, stealing, burglarizing, lying, using, and living on the streets. Somehow (not covered in this book, to my disappointment), he got his life together, became a star as a crime novelist, and then decided to re-open the 30-year-old unsolved murder of his mother. Ellroy himself admits that he had dubious motives for re-visiting his mother's murder case--he thought writing an article for GQ about his fascinating past would generate some excellent publicity for his upcoming novel. To his own surprise, Ellroy became engrossed in the dead-end case. He was mystified as the concept of his mother as anything other than a "drunken whore." Ellroy ends up partnering with seasoned homicide detective Bill Toner to re-open then case, investigate 30-year-old leads, trace old witnesses, and garner publicity for potential witnesses to come forward. During the course of the new investigation, Ellroy learns more than he planned about his mother's past, her motivations, and her heritage...which is his own heritage. The memoir is structured into four parts--(1) a third person, chillingly detailed account of the 1958 murder and ensuing investigation, (2) a first-person account of Ellroy's boyhood, loss of his mother, and descent into criminality and vagrancy, (3) a third-person telling of the career of Bill Stoner and his successes and frustrations in homicide investigations, and, finally, (4) the story of the Ellroy/Stoner partnership in re-opening the murder investigation. Through and through, the book reveals the tedium of chasing down tenuous leads, dealing with crazy tips, canvassing for tiny leads, and the overwhelming dedicated labor of crime detectives. Reading about all the dead leads can exhaust the reader, so one can only imagine how the detectives felt. Due to the four-part structure, those coming for "true crime" will most like the first and third parts, while anyone who is interested in Ellroy as a person will enjoy the second part, but may well be frustrated that many years of his life immediately before his success as an author are omitted. The fourth part, about the re-opened investigation, is frustrating for both the participants and the reader, and lacks nice, neat Hollywood-style plot developments. But it is real life!

Over the past twenty years, James Ellroy has written nearly a dozen novels that have established him as the foremost contemporary successor to the noir crime fiction of forerunners such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett and James Cain. Set primarily in Los Angeles (although some of his novels, such as "American Tabloid", have taken on bigger settings and themes), Ellroy's narratives are marked by what one critic has described as a "telegraphic" style, one short sentence following another in a breathless staccato of hard-boiled language, graphic (at times grisly) description, and a pervasive, and often seemingly morbid and pessimistic, obsession with sexual crime and violence. Ellroy is an astonishingly good writer, albeit a writer who is not for everyone: his vivid and grotesquely detailed explorations of rape and murder, of men preying on woman, of brutal police practices, often make the reader squeamish and uncomfortable. The effect is powerful testimony to the talent.But where does Ellroy's remarkable writing come from? "My Dark Places," subtitled "An L.A. Crime Memoir," provides an answer: from the real life noir of Ellroy's life.On a Sunday morning in June, 1958, James Ellroy's forty-five year old mother, Jean, was murdered. Her body was found in a vacant lot next to a school in El Monte, California, a gritty, working class city east of Los Angeles. "A nylon stocking and a cotton cord were lashed around her neck. Both ligatures were tightly knotted." James Ellroy was ten years old at the time. His parents were divorced. He had just returned home from a weekend visit with his father when he was told about the murder. While a "Swarthy Man" was seen with the victim, the murder was never solved."My Dark Places" tells the story of Jean Ellroy's murder in 1958. It also tells the story of the next twenty years of James Ellroy's life, when he drifted to drugs and alcohol, to an obsession with crimes of sex and violence, to a kind of noirish bottom which was the prelude to his life as a writer. It tells the story of how the noir obsessions of Ellroy's fictions were the creative and self-sustaining response to the dark episodes of his real life. And, finally, it tells the story of Ellroy's renewed search for his mother's murderer and, along the way, his search for his mother herself. In Ellroy's words:"I knew things about us. I sensed other things. Her death corrupted my imagination and gave me exploitable gift. My mother gave me the gift and the curse of obsession. It began as curiosity in lieu of childish grief. It flourished as a quest for dark knowledge and mutated into a horrible thirst for sexual and mental stimulation. Obsessive drives almost killed me. A rage to turn my obsessions into something good and useful saved me. I outlived the curse. The gift assumed its final form in language.""My Dark Places" is a dark and disturbing memoir, an intimate plunge into the life and the psyche of James Ellroy. It is also, like

This is a remarkable book. If there were a five-plus rating, that is what I'd give to this astonishing work of art.James Ellroy's quest is to solve the 1958 murder of his mother. Along the way, we learn about his twisted adolescence, and his brushes with madness, depicted brilliantly.The reader has to have come to grips with his or her own demons in order to be comfortable reading this book, in that Ellroy's feelings for his murdered mother include the incestuous feelings Freud always claimed we all feel for our opposite sex parents. Ellroy describes these feelings with enormous intensity. In fact, this book is all about intensity, from the first page to the last.I've read any number of true crime books, and though this is not exactly a true crime read, that's about as close as the reader can come to describing it. In the books I've read, the victims have, unfortunately, not been described intently enough that I've really remembered them after I've finished the book. With My Dark Places, Ellroy so intensely describes his mother, Jean, that she is as real to me as someone I knew intimately.I think, in fact, that "intimate" describes this entire book. Rather than give away any of the story, let me just say that this book is as intimate as a dark night's sexual encounter with someone dangerous.This is one of the best books of any kind that I've yet read.

Both autobiography and biography, Ellroy narrates the account of his search for the truth behind his mother's murder in four parts. He begins with a cold journalistic account of the initial investigation that does not quite come off. In part two, he details a protracted adolescence that begins at age 9 when his mother is murdered and does not end until he is 30, in which his existence deteriorates into what call only be called depravity. The third part of the book delves into the life and career of real-life cop Bill Stoner and the beginning of the reinvestigation into the murder with Ellroy. The final part details his mother's life up until her murder, the outcome of the reinvestigation, the last murder case in the career of Stoner, and the trial of O.J. Simpson. This book is a must read for many reasons, but chiefly for its brutal honesty. Firstly, it is an unadulterated autobiographical account of the writer's complicated psychology and his descent into sexual perversion, drug addiction, alcoholism, and petty criminality. Rarely do we admit these to our close family and friends let alone an international audience and certainly not with the perceptiveness and brilliant narrative that Ellroy is capable of. Secondly, nobody knows the mind of cops like Ellroy. His are like no others described in fiction or fact, they are flawed geniuses that demand condemnation and sympathy simultaneously.