My Dark Places

James Ellroy's hard-boiled detective fiction is like Raymond Chandler's with a darker post-modern edge. His heroes are almost as nasty as the scum they track through a sordid underworld. This non-fiction book is written in much the same style as his fiction, with his trademark staccato prose, his expletive-laden dialog, his air of worldly cynicism. Yet here Ellroy is writing of a real-life murder, that of his own mother, who was strangled to death in sensational film noir circumstances in 1958 when he was ten. Ellroy's memoir tells how he hired a retired police detective to help him investigate the never-solved crime. Ellroy gets to play a real private P.I. as the two follow various leads. They don't close the case, but the book reveals some of the demons that have fueled Ellroy's fiction.