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 his novels, a chilling exploration of real life crimes of sex and violence in Los Angeles, Ellroy's search for his mother's murderer being the touchstone for a narrative contrail of grisly and perverse crimes that he encounters along the way.
Jean Ellroy, a former Midwest beauty contest winner who had come to Southern California in hopes of becoming a film star, had been raped, then strangled, her body left in an empty lot next door to a school. The tragic death prompted Ellroy's life to spin into a web of tragedy and confusion and he did not find himself and end his turbulent existence until he reached his thirties.
After his mother's death young Ellroy went to live with his father. His parents had divorced and his father, an accountant who once worked for screen siren Rita Hayworth, was going to seed through alcohol. At a time when Ellroy needed stability and proper attention he received neither.
Ellroy sought recognition in the wrong way. Attending a predominantly Jewish school in West Los Angeles, he successfully shocked and antagonized his schoolmates after riding his bicycle to Hollywood and obtaining anti-Semitic right wing hate literature from the notorious John Birchite local bookstore, "Poor Richard's," reading the material, then unleashing it on his schoolmates. He also lost himself in a world of alcohol and drugs, holed up in an abandoned residence at one point, and burgled homes in the area.
His life began taking a different turn when he went to work at a ritzy local country club. Though he was ultimately fired after a physical altercation, it was here that Ellroy stumbled on what would become a lucrative profession that would make him an international celebrity. Still seeking to comprehend the meaning of his mother's unsolved murder, Ellroy began reading Jack Webb's magazine regularly. Webb became famous in the fifties as the creator of the hugely successful "Dragnet" television series, which he produced and starred in, playing a Los Angeles police detective. Ellroy read the magazines religiously, began reading crime novels of the greats such as Chandler and Hammett, and finally began writing himself. It was anything but coincidental that one of Ellroy's biggest hits was "The Black Dahlia" based on the character Elizabeth Short, who came to Los Angeles in hopes of becoming a film star, was brutally murdered, and left in a vacant lot by her killer. The facts closely paralleled the life and death of Jean Ellroy.
When Ellroy achieved riches and renown, also producing such runaway bestsellers as "American Tabloid" and "L.A. Confidential," the latter becoming a highly successful film, he turned his attention to the detective case which had dominated his mind from 1958, the unsolved murder of his mother. Ellroy secured the services of retired Los Angeles homicide detective Bill Stoner to assist him in his effort to crack the case. Ultimately Stoner would become the detective novelist's best friend as they revisited crime scenes in and around El Monte and closely re-examined all available evidence.
While their cumulative efforts would not result in finding the killer or killers of Jean Ellroy, the novelist would find the experience cathartic. He came to know his mother in a way he never had earlier.
One of the most interesting aspects of the investigation was the interview of a woman who had been working as a car hop at a drive in, believed to be the last person to see Jean Ellroy alive aside from her killer. The woman described Jean as a gregarious, friendly woman. The man with her, however, was uncommunicative. The description she gave of a tall, swarthy, dark-haired man correlates with the disclosures of others who earlier that night saw Jean drinking with a man fitting that description at an El Monte nightclub-bar. The same man had been seen at the same establishment as well as another in the area prior to that night. He would never be seen again in the area.
Speculation further abounded over the murder by strangulation of a woman not far from where Jean Ellroy met her death about a year later. If the suspect in question had been a serial killer, however, using that MO, then a question emerged: Why was there no further evidence of future murders or attempts?
The best guess as to what happened to Jean Ellroy was furnished by those who concluded that her killer, expecting sex, ran into resistance. Deciding to take her despite her resistance, spurred on by alcohol, he ultimately concluded that it was better to kill Jean Ellroy rather than risk her reporting the rape to the police. It was very late, dark, and there was presumably no one around so the rapist decided to opt for murder to silence Jean Ellroy. Police investigators speculate that he was an intelligent, perhaps well educated man due to the thoroughness displayed subsequent to the killing. In that he was never seen in El Monte again he might well have been from another area.
This is a work perhaps even more riveting than Ellroy's traditional page-turning fiction in that this is a story of a young boy who lost his mother at the impressionable age of 10, and who was determined to understand Jean Ellroy better and reach a measure of closure in his life.
