Clandestine

With his outsize personality and distinctive prose style, James Ellroy (b. 1948) is one of the finest modern authors of hard-boiled fiction. His mother was murdered in 1958, and in his twenties Ellroy moved from job to job, finally finding steady work as a caddy, an experience which formed the backdrop for his first mystery, Brown’s Requiem.He drew a cult following with his first books, which included the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy of police novels, and found widespread fame with 1987’s The Black Dahlia, a meticulously researched account of Los Angeles’s most famous unsolved murder.That novel and 1990’s L.A. Confidential, both of which were adapted for the screen, cemented his notoriety as an author of historical crime fiction. Ellroy lives and works in Los Angeles.