James Ellroy: In His Own Words

Q: What is the root of your obsession with violence and murder?

A: The dye was cast on Sunday, June 22, 1958 when I was ten years old and a rather large cop squatted down to my ten-year-old level and said, "Son, your mother has been killed." Then, the feeling was relief. Then, my bereavement was taken over by a greater sense of freedom from this woman that I hated. The event instilled in me an obsession with all things criminal and violent. This obsession and my loathing for her blunted the real horror and despair and depression I might have felt in the manner a kid is supposed to. I have been able to put that obsession to good use as a novelist, but, of course, that was years later.

Q: Why did you re-open your mother's murder case? Was your pursuit to find your mother's killer really out of a need to see justice served or more an effort to make sense of your own life, and hers?

A: A friend of mine told me that he would be seeing my mother's murder file as part of an assignment on old San Gabriel Valley murders spotlighting five unsolved murders, my mother's included. It occurred to me that my friend would read the reports and see the crime scene file. I had to see that file so I got an assignment from my editor at G.Q. to do the piece that eventually became My Dark Places. When I opened the first page of the crime report, I realized . . . this isn't over. I had understood her death intellectually, but now it was as if a little gear clicked and I could understand it fully for the first time. I couldn't afford to take two years off and play homicide detective. There had to be a book in it. I knew it was unlikely going in that we would find the killer. I knew that I could live with a negative or positive result. The killer was irrelevant; this was all about the search for her.

Q: Do you believe that there is a "kind of man who kills"? Is there "a kind of woman who will die at that man's hands"? Was your mother that kind of woman?

A: Statistically that is a viable question. Women kill far less frequently and, generally, with more justification. Men will kill at the drop of a hat. In this case, I believe that only that man could have killed my mother that night and only she could have provided the stimulus. Men who kill are generally at least momentarily unconscious; they are impaired by the use of alcohol or drugs either at the moment they kill or as a result of the cumulative effects of those substances. Often they'll read some kind of expletive flashpoint when in the presence of a woman, and the stimulus will be so profound they will kill. In my mother's case, I think she simply said, "No, not tonight." Her torture, the zenith of that night--that's what produced this crime.

Q: My Dark Places is undeniably a monument to your mother; do you feel that you have succeeded in resurrecting her?

A: Yes, although the journey continues. Closure is bullshit. My relationship to my mother and her death will continue to be in some state of flux and it may even follow me to whatever plane of consciousness exists after I am dead. I've had a lot of thrills as a novelist and nothing comes close to giving her life in this way. My Dark Places is the only one of my books that I re-read continually. I want to put her out there, and put her out there, and put her out there. It's sexual; it's as if I can't see her through this veil of thirty-nine years and I'm constantly trying to break down that wall of time with my memory. My writing is the only way I know how. Is it inherently frustrating? Yes, but it's a frustration I can live with.

Q: Is there an Ellroy character in your crime novels? That is to say, a damaged soul whose issues with women and violence are profound and destructive?

A: There is a damaged soul in L.A. Confidential who is familiar to me. Bud White's issues are profound but ultimately constructive. Bud is a brutal male who watched his father torture his mother and sat there while her body, beaten and chained to a radiator, rotted. I love that guy. I love the way he is driven by tender feelings for women, that he is driven to put the screws in place, and nail the perpetrators to the wall. Bud White is the most noble character in all of my books.

Q: Where does the depiction of Detective Bill Stoner as the picture of benevolence come from, as it is sort of a departure from the rogue cop antiheros and leg-breakers in your crime fiction?

A: I was very lucky that Stoner was the man I met when I came to see my mother's file. Before we actually looked at the file, he told me the story of the Beckett/Stewart case and took me straight into Tracy Stewart's terror. The dye was cast from that story. I spent 15 months out there. Bill Stoner and I have remained great friends. This is a policeman character so complex, so ambiguous in some ways, I never could have created him and wouldn't have wanted to. When I first met him he flashed a copy of my novel White Jazz and asked me why all the cops in my books were perverts and extortionists. I said good cops made for bad fiction.

Q: Was there frustration or resolve when you realized that your mother's case would be left, yet again, unsolved?

A: It only takes one phone call to solve it. In the new Vintage edition of My Dark Places there will be a computer link address and an 800 number. The more publicity my books get the greater the chance. What people don't understand is that I was a happy man before I started writing My Dark Places, and I'm a happier man now. I never felt I was a victim. Daytime television does this to people. I think that my mother's story will never end. It is one of such intransience.

Q: Having told this pinnacle of a story, are there more shadows in your mind to continue producing the noir thrillers for which you have come to be so well known?

A: Yes. After a while, if you want to grow as a writer, it becomes a question of consciousness. Every writer works from the standpoint of what has formed them. Most writers are informed by something other than what my experience has been but nevertheless, eventually you tap out the thematic unity in your conscious. You have to address improving your writing consciously rather than relying on your own story for every novel you write. I want to write deeper, darker, richer, better, more profound books. Crime in 20th century history is a wellspring that will continue to inspire me.

Q: An interviewer said about you once that you hung in the balance between an image of yourself as perpetrator and that of investigator. Is this true? Do you identify now more with the perpetrators or the investigators in your fiction?

A: I always identified more with the investigators. Maybe because they resemble perpetrators.