Author of the week: James Ellroy

last updated 8 January 2015

Novelist James Ellroy has not yet written all he feels he must about the murder of his mother, said Andrew Anthony in the London Guardian. His new memoir, The Hilliker Curse, came about because Ellroy decided that his first attempt, 1996’s My Dark Places, spent too much time puzzling over who’d committed the unsolved 1958 homicide and why. In the new book, the author of The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential instead uses the crime as a touchstone for exploring his own lifelong obsession with women. “My mother and I are a love story,” he says. “We’re not a crime story.” Ellroy was 10 when his mother’s body was found on an L.A. street. He claims he’s spent the past five decades searching for the one woman who could fill the void his mother left.

By the evidence of The Hilliker Curse, he may have found her, said Amy Wallace in Los Angeles Magazine. After two previous marriages and numerous other grand but doomed affairs, Ellroy is actually talking about his desire to start a family with critic and fellow writer Erika Schickel. But fans shouldn’t worry that finally landing what he calls “the mother, the female, the Other” will end his compulsion to write. First, as he himself explains, “I more often than not suffocate or discard what I want most.” More to the point, he’s actually planning a new “quartet” of big, dark novels set in 1940s L.A. The femme fatale of the first book will bear his mother’s name.