My Dark Places | James Ellroy

My Dark Places | James Ellroy | "the sky was a carcinogenic tan"

books:

My Dark Places

	My Dark Places James Ellroy Vintage, 1997 - 427 pages average customer review:based on 77 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

"Astonishing . . . original, daring, brilliant."
--Philadelphia Inquirer

In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself.

In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten--and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.

"Ellroy is more powerful than ever."
--The Nation

for more information click here

Relentless

To better understand (if not enjoy) My Dark Places, I would suggest that you need to have read at least one Ellroy novel. It will help to put this semi-autobiography into perspective, and if you're already an Ellroy fan it will make a great deal more sense. It's an extraordinary piece of work, so ruthlessly exhaustive in its detail that I for one felt almost physically tired by the time I had finished. Not tired of reading the book itself, but tired just to think of the incredible lengths Ellroy went to in order to track down his mother's killer some 37/38 years after her death in 1958. Although the book is dedicated to Ellroy's wife Helen, it could just as well have been dedicated to Bill Stoner, the retired ex-detective who committed himself absolutely to the cause of helping Ellroy in his unusual quest - but this might be an opportunity to mention two of Ellroy's greatest works American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, one a sequel to the other; the latter was in fact dedicated to Stoner and deservedly so.

In one sense I feel that this book was written almost exclusively for Ellroy himself to read, I'm sure that he had little commercial incentive or reasoning to do it. Yet the raw, body-pummelling honesty of the book from start to finish makes for fascinating reading for those who, like myself, have ever wondered what made Ellroy write in the way he does in such classics as The Black Dahlia or The Big Nowhere. I have to admit that the short sentence style adopted in My Dark Places does irritate at times, in spite of the fact that the writer explains this after the end of the story. It gave me the impression that what we are reading, much of the time, are either his own or Stoner's investigatory notes and copied to the page verbatim.

The lasting impression though is the tireless and absolutely relentless commitment to the cause of a murder investigation. Although there are only a handful of characters who appear in the book throughout, there are nevertheless several hundred others who are mentioned during its course, the majority of whom are either related to the victim or are suspected of being so - and ALL of these suspects, no matter how faint their association to the crime might seem, have to be contacted and interviewed. I guess that this gives us an insight into the mechanics of any murder investigation, and how different it is to the relative glamourisation we see on the TV. This book covers, in finite detail, the day-to-day work of a real-life murder investigation, one which was spread well over a year and one which covered every single day of that period. The huge difference of course is that the victim is the investigator's mother, and the death took place most of his life ago.

After closing the last page, I felt that while I didn't exactly understand Ellroy as a personality that much better, I certainly knew him and his motives as a writer more than I had. My Dark Places strips away much of the mystery surrounding him and helps to explain what made him a self-styled specialist of 1950's LA crime fiction; he was a victim of the real thing.

for more information click here

"the sky was a carcinogenic tan"

My Dark Places stands alone among the most naked, poignant, exquisite writing I have ever encountered. Anyone unmoved by either its subject matter or the sheer beauty of Ellroy's prose must be clinically dead.

Darkness and the Dahlia

I've been a fan of James Ellroy since reading "The Black Dahlia" years ago. He blended violent death and raw eroticism, threw in a few dashes of creative nonfiction, and came up with a fast-paced noir tale about a detective who becomes obsessed with the murdered Elizabeth Short, aka The Black Dahlia. The protagonist doesn't content himself with merely trying to unmask her killer- he pursues Short as if she were yet attainable, loving her more in death than he ever could have in life.

"My Dark Places" evolved from an article Ellroy wrote for GQ Magazine after viewing the homicide file of his mother, Geneva 'Jean' Ellroy, whose strangled remains were dumped in a seedy L.A. suburb in 1958. The killer was never found and the case was closed, but the ten year old Ellroy was left with a lifelong fascination with the beautiful and the slaughtered. After battling through a personal hell of drug and alcohol addiction, he made unconscious attempts to reconnect with his mother by writing provocative and darkly loving crime fiction whose primary love interests were dead women.

Ellroy teamed up with veteran homicide detective Bill Stoner and re-opened the thirty year old case case. They pored over yellowing files and battered evidence boxes, and interviewed some of the last people to see Geneva Ellroy alive. Ellroy recounts their efforts in a suspenseful manner that would do justice to a good piece of detective fiction. While their investigation does not result in the finding of her killer, Ellroy clearly experiences a psychic catharsis in the process, and the reader witnesses a documented softening of a child's hostility into an adult son's love for a mother he never truly knew.

for more information click here

The Missing Years: A Possible Explanation

As an Ellroy fan, I, too, was annoyed at his not telling us the full story of how he "turned his life around" -- but then I recalled his mentions of 12-Step groups. In NA, AA, CA and all the rest, "A" stands for "anonymous." Mr. Ellroy might choose to disclose how 12-Step recovery groups helped him (members can compromise their own anonymity), but a careful reader will notice he doesn't do much beyond making mention of his involvement in such groups, tells a couple of anecdotes and that's it. He's honor-bound not to provide any details that might compromise the anonymity of another member (e.g, his sponsor, those other group members who helped him through the inevitable crises). Bill Wilson (whose last name we NOW know), one of the founders of AA, always emphasized that the welfare of the group was more important than the self-interest of any of its members. Fortunately, Ellroy was doing pretty well by the time he wrote This memoir, so (I'm surmising) he didn't have to fight with his conscience over including more specific information to boost sales. Consequently, we really can't expect a clear picture of recovery aided by 12-Step groups. I definitely picked up that Ellroy is very much aware that his involvement in such groups saved his life. I don't know the man personally, but by the time he wrote this, we had become a facile enough writer to "dance around" the subject of those lost years. Unwilling to fictionalize a memoir -- and he does strike me an a honorable man -- he did the best he could. The result? A somewhat choppy book that looks as if it could use surgical editing (to "track" the story properly). This book clearly comes from deep within Ellroy -- and it's a book he HAD to write. Try to temper your judgment of its style and structure with that knowledge and, I hope, compassionate understanding of the author.

for more information click here

Needed an editor

James Ellroy is undeniably a great writer, and the story he tells here --the unsolved murder of his mother when he was ten years old, and how the fact marked (and almost ruined) his life-- is an amazing one. But the book suffers, in my opinion, from a lack of editing. You can't blame Ellroy for believing that every single detail about the case, and his struggle to solve it, is fascinating, but the truth is, the writing suffers from too many details--some of them, irrelevant and even boring. A good editor could have transformed great but raw material into what it should have been: a masterpiece.

for more information click here