Books for the Mansion Family: James Ellroy

By Ray Dussault

When James Ellroy steps up on the stage, you might want to check your chair for a seatbelt-this is one writer that knows how to take the audience for a ride.

"I write books for the whole family," he breathed into the microphone opening a recent event at California State University, Sacramento. "That is, if you're the Manson family."

Ellroy is best known for his L.A. Quartet, four highly acclaimed novels that paint a portrait of 1950s Los Angeles. The series begins with the "Black Dahlia" and includes "L.A. Confidential" which was brought to the big screen in 1997. His heroes are complex, walking a thin line between good and evil. The writer followed up the quartet with "American Tabloid", his retelling of American history during the Kennedy years. The sequel is due out in late 2000.

"Peepers, pimps and pederasts," Ellroy continued, practically howling at the Sacramento Bee Book Club sponsored event. "I am going to leave you reamed, steamed and dry-cleaned!" From there the quintessential Los Angeles writer, launched into an animated performance reading from his latest work, "Crime Wave: Reportage and Fiction From the Underside of L.A." (Vintage Crime, $12).

That underside is something Ellroy knows well. He lived most of his life there: in L.A. and on the underside. From a divorced family, Ellroy stayed with his mother until she was found murdered when he was 10. His rather inept father took over and it wasn't long before Ellroy was prowling houses, trying drugs, stealing women's underwear and sleeping in parks. Throughout his twenties he bounced from kitchen jobs to caddying, subsisting on an intellectual diet of the crime fiction and scandal magazines. Somehow, either in spite of or because of this past, he became a writer. "My mother's murder left me tremendously curious about all things criminal," he mused about his favored subject matter. The murder has never been solved and Ellroy wrote about it in his 1997 memoir "My Dark Places." "Crime fascinates all of us. We like to look at it and touch it, while staying safe. Great crime fiction pulls that rug out from under you and gets your hands burned. Bad crime fiction gives you neat, tidy resolutions and is as dismissable as a box of Kleenex."

The one thing Ellroy is not is dismissable.