My Dark Places

Memoirs don’t often feature mysteries, but Elroy, known for tough, cynical crime novels such as L.A. Confidential, centers his around his obsession with the unsolved murder of his mother in 1958 when Elroy was ten. With allusions to the famous Blue Dahlia case, Elroy writes with brutal frankness about his own pathologies and his weirdly loving relationship with his neglectful, alcoholic father. If nothing else, this absorbing book—hard to read and equally hard to put down—solves the mystery of why Elroy and his novels come off as so creepy.

In 1958, ten-year-old James Ellroy returned to his home in El Monte, California, to find police squad cars parked in front of the house. He knew instantly that his mother, Jean Hilliker Ellroy, had been murdered. The die, as he wrote, was cast: crime became his obsession and—ultimately and ironically—his salvation. In this raw and unblinking memoir, the author of The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential returns to the scene of his first crime to try to solve the cold case of a death in the family. Don’t let the hard-boiled attitude fool you. 

This 1996 memoir reads like much of Ellroy’s fiction: hard-boiled and from-the-gut. The author’s mother was raped and murdered in 1958, the perpetrator never found. He recalls his troubled childhood and adolescence and a nascent writing career spurred by his obsession with LA’s notorious Black Dahlia case. Between these episodes, Ellroy recounts his efforts, 38 years on, and with the aid of a private investigator, to find an answer to the mystery of his mother’s death.