I’m with you now. You ran and hid and I found you. Your secrets were not safe with me. You earned my devotion. You paid for it in public disclosure.
I robbed your grave. I revealed you. I showed you in shameful moments. I learned things about you. Everything I learned made me love you more dearly.
I’ll learn more. I’ll follow your tracks and invade your hidden time. I’ll uncover your lies. I’ll rewrite your history and revise my judgment as your old secrets explode. I will justify it all in the name of the obsessive life you gave me.
I can’t hear your voice. I can smell you and taste your breath. I can feel you. You’re brushing against me. You’re gone and I want more of you.
The investigation continues.
Information on the case can be forwarded
to Detective Stoner either through
the toll-free number, 1-800-717-6517, or
his e-mail address, detstoner@earthlink.net.
ALSO BY JAMES ELLROY
“Nobody in his generation matches the breadth and
depth of James Ellroy’s way with noir.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CRIME WAVE
Los Angeles. In no other city do sex, celebrity, money, and crime exert such an irresistible magnetic field. And no writer has mapped that field with greater savagery and savvy than James Ellroy. With this fever-hot collection of reportage and short fiction, Ellroy returns to his native habitat and portrays it as a smog-shrouded netherworld where “every third person is a peeper, prowler, pederast, prostitute, pillhead, pothead or pimp.”
From the 1950s scandal sheets to this morning’s police blotter, and from his mother’s unsolved murder to the slaying of Nicole Brown Simpson, Ellroy investigates true crimes and restores humanity to their victims. He also enlists the forgotten luminaries of a vanished Hollywood in two baroquely twisted novellas of slaughter, smut-mongering, and corruption.
True Crime/Crime Fiction/0-375-70471-X
VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD
Print free Reading Group Guides at www.vintagebooks.com
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 1997
Copyright © 1996 by James Ellroy
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Photographic credits:
Page 97: Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, UCLA
Library
Page 187: Kathleen Clark
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Ellroy, James, [date]
My dark places: an L.A. Crime memoir / by James Ellroy—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-48851-0
1. Ellroy, James [date]—Family. 2. Novelists, American—20th century
—Family relationships. 3. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Social conditions.
4. Mothers and sons—California—Los Angeles.
5. Murder—California—Los Angeles. I. Title.
PS3555.L6274Z466 1996
813’.54—dc20
[B] 96-36673
CIP
Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
v3.0