Showing results by author "James Ellroy" in All Categories

In 1995, James Ellroy’s novel American Tabloid shocked the world with its gritty reimagining of the events leading up to the JFK assassination. Now, an all-star cast brings Ellroy’s masterwork to life in this gripping new audio adaptation.

In disgrace after a badly handled arrest in New Orleans, Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins is assigned as a liaison officer to an FBI investigation of a series of diabolical and clever bank robberies. Three men have done their homework: they choose bank managers who are having affairs, kidnap their girlfriends, and force the managers to open the banks early.

Fritz Brown’s L.A. - and his life - are masses of contradictions, like stirring chorales sung for the dead. A less-than-spotless former cop with a drinking problem - a private-eye-cum-repo man with a taste for great music - he has been known to wallow in the grime beneath the Hollywood glitter. But Fritz Brown’s life is about to change, thanks to the appearance of a racist psycho who flashes too much cash for a golf caddie and who walked away clean from a multiple murder rap.

4 de agosto de 1962. Los Ángeles está que hierve, en medio de una intensa ola de calor. Una estrella de cine B ha sido secuestrada en extrañas circunstancias. Y acaban de encontrar el cuerpo sin vida de Marilyn Monroe. ¿Sobredosis, suicidio, asesinato? El jefe de policía William H. Parker pone sobre la pista a Freddy Otash, expolicía corrupto y extorsionador, que no tardará en intuir que ambos casos están relacionados. Pero, si quiere salvar su propio pellejo no puede limitarse a descubrir la verdad: deberá encontrar pruebas que alejen a los Kennedy de los rumores de asesinato.

Los Angeles, August 4, 1962. The city broils through a midsummer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash. The freewheeling Freddy O: tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is love.” Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe’s death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle

Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins can't stand music, or any loud sounds. He's got a beautiful wife, but he can't get enough of other women. And instead of bedtime stories, he regales his daughters with bloody crime stories. He's a thinking man's cop with a dark past and an obsessive drive to hunt down monsters who prey on the innocent. Now, there's something haunting him. He sees a connection in a series of increasingly gruesome murders of women committed over a period of 20 years.

Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian countermeasures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History.

Fred Underhill is a young cop on the rise in Los Angeles in the early 1950s - a town blinded to its own grime by Hollywood glitter; a society nourished by newspaper lies that wants its heroes all-American and squeaky clean. A chance to lead on a possible serial killing is all it takes to fuel Underhill's reckless ambition - and it propels him into a dangerous alliance with certain mad and unstable elements of the law enforcement hierarchy. When the case implodes with disastrous consequences, it is Fred Underhill who takes the fall. His life is in ruins, his promising future suddenly a dream of the past.

Dig. The Demon Dog gets down with a new book of scenes from America’s capital of kink: Los Angeles. Fourteen pieces, some fiction, some nonfiction, all true enough to be admissible as state’s evidence, and half of it in print for the first time. And every one of them bearing the James Ellroy brand of mayhem, machismo, and hollow-nose prose.

Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns - it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer, a power in his own small corner of hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire. Klein's been hung out as bait, "a bad cop to draw the heat", and the heat's coming from all sides.

In The Cold Six Thousand, James Ellroy's most ambitious and explosive novel yet, he puts the whole of the 1960s under his blistering lens. The result is a work of fierce, epic fiction, a speedball through our most tumultuous time.

It is December 6, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal Japanese-Americans—but now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins.

In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself.

On January 15, 1947, the tortured body of a beautiful young woman was found in a vacant lot in Hollywood. Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, a young Hollywood hopeful, had been brutally murdered. Her murder sparked one of the greatest manhunts in California history.

January '42. L.A. reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese residents are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops tag it a routine dead-man job. They're wrong. It's an early-warning signal of chaos. There's a murderous fire and a gold heist. There's Fifth Column treason on American soil. There are homegrown Nazis, Commies, and race racketeers. It's populism ascendant. There's two dead cops in a dive off the jazz-club strip. And three men and one woman have a hot date with history.

Freddy Otash was the man in the know and the man to know in '50s LA. He was a rogue cop, a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp - and, most notably, the head strong-arm goon for Confidential magazine. Confidential presaged the idiot internet - and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink, and the scurrilous skank.

Three citizens are butchered during a liquor store holdup. An unstable veteran cop vanishes without a trace. Nothing connects these events except for a nagging hunch in the back of Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins' brain--a sinister foreboding that will lead him through the sin-and-sleaze playground of nighttime L.A. on the trail of a psycho psychiatrist with a talent for terror and mind-control. His gore-soaked journey through Hell will plunge this determined manhunter into the dark heart of madness--and beyond.

We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination - in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, DC....

Six prisoners are beaten senseless in their cells by cops crazed on alcohol. For the three LAPD detectives involved, it will expose the guilty secrets on which they have built their corrupt and violent careers.

From the Demon Dog of American literature comes James Ellroy’s Hollywood Death Trip. Dig into a quintet of highly stylized true crime that delves into some of the most notorious, unsolved, midcentury-Hollywood murders. Ellroy’s wicked baritone draws listeners into a series of hellacious crimes; beginning with the heartbreaking and gruesome murder of his own mother. Next, it’s the Karen Kupcinet Killing - her body, found strangled just days after JFK’s assassination. Beautiful Stephanie Gorman, a debutante killed by a stranger, made Los Angeles lock its doors at night. The series concludes with the salacious snuff of actor Sal Mineo, whose death is a fitting epigraph for a series set in “Hollyweird”.