In 1981, Ellroy published his first novel, ''
Brown's Requiem, a detective story drawing on his experiences as a caddie. He then published Clandestine
and Silent Terror
(which was later published under the title Killer on the Road''). Ellroy followed these three novels with the
Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy. The novels are centered on Hopkins, a brilliant but disturbed LAPD robbery-homicide detective, and are set mainly in the 1980s. He is a self-described recluse who possesses very few technological amenities, including television, and claims never to read contemporary books by other authors, aside from
Joseph Wambaugh's
The Onion Field, out of concern that they might influence his own. However, this does not mean that Ellroy does not read at all, as he claims in
My Dark Places to have read at least two books a week growing up, eventually shoplifting more to satisfy his love of reading. He then goes on to say that he read works by
Dashiell Hammett and
Raymond Chandler.
Writing style Hallmarks of his work include dense plotting and a relentlessly
pessimistic—albeit
moral—worldview. His work has earned Ellroy the nickname "Demon dog of American crime fiction." Ellroy writes longhand on legal pads rather than on a computer. He prepares elaborate outlines for his books, most of which are several hundred pages long. He often employs a sort of telegraphese (stripped-down, staccato-like sentence structures), a style that reaches its apex in
The Cold Six Thousand. Ellroy describes it as a "direct, shorter-rather-than-longer sentence style that's declarative and ugly and right there, punching you in the nards."
The Black Dahlia, for example, fused the real-life murder of Elizabeth Short with a fictional story of two police officers investigating the crime.
Underworld USA Trilogy In 1995, Ellroy published
American Tabloid, the first novel in a series informally dubbed the "
Underworld USA Trilogy" In 2008,
The Library of America selected the essay "My Mother's Killer" from
My Dark Places for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.
Other Ellroy is currently writing a "Second L.A. Quartet" taking place during the
Second World War, with some characters from the first
L.A. Quartet and the
Underworld USA Trilogy reappearing in younger depictions. The first book,
Perfidia, was released on September 9, 2014. The second book is titled
This Storm, which had a release date of May 14, 2019. It was released on May 30, 2019, in the United Kingdom, and June 4, 2019, in the United States. A
Waterstones exclusive limited edition of
Perfidia was published two days after its initial release and included an essay by Ellroy titled "Ellroy's History—Then and Now".. Ellroy
dedicated Perfidia "To Lisa Stafford". The
epigraph is "Envy thou not the oppressor, And choose none of his ways" from
Proverbs 3:31. In collaboration with the Los Angeles Police Museum and Glynn Martin, the museum's
executive director, Ellroy released ''
LAPD '53'' on May 19, 2015. Photography from the museum's archives are presented alongside Ellroy's writings about crime and law enforcement during that era. In the fall of 2017, Ellroy investigated the murder of
Sal Mineo. Reminiscent of how he investigated his mother's unsolved murder, Ellroy worked with Glynn Martin, an ex-LAPD officer, the LAPD Museum's current executive director, and co-author of ''LAPD '53
. Ellroy wrote about this investigation for The Hollywood Reporter in digital form on December 21, 2018, and it also appeared in published form in the December 18, 2018, issue of The Hollywood Reporter'' magazine. Early in January 2019, Ellroy posted news on jamesellroy.net, writing: "I'm digitally illiterate, so you’ve got to gas on the fact that I'm breaking
baaaaaaaaad from tradition, in order to post this announcement." Ellroy posted that he had been inducted into the
Everyman's Library series. Three Everyman's Library editions have been reprinted:
The L.A. Quartet,
The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I and
The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume II. The release dates for these editions, as well as
This Storm: A Novel, was June 4, 2019. Ellroy added, "Stay stirringly tuned to this website for further updates", and simply signed the finished post
Ellroy, inserting a dog's pawprint below it. In 2022 Ellroy, a long-time fan of
Chester Himes, wrote the introduction to Himes's classic
A Rage in Harlem. In his hard-bitten style, Ellroy raves that A Rage in Harlem' features a mind-mauling array of chump-change hustles, lurid larcenies, and malicious mischief."The novel was originally published in France in 1958 where it won France's "Grand Prix de Littérature Policière", and was most recently re-published by Vintage Books. In 2023, at the
LA Times Festival of Books, Ellroy revealed, in light of his latest book
The Enchanters and his editors' response to it, that he had abandoned his previous plans to write a "Second L.A. Quartet" and would instead turn it into a
quintet, with
The Enchanters being the third of five books in the series. The later books in the series will be set in the 1960s and will tie back in to the World War II setting,
Japanese internment and the immediate post-war setting initially established in
Perfidia and
This Storm. ==Public life and views==