M E N U   Home What is O'Casey's? What's On? This Month's Author Our Readers Photo Gallery Recordings Archives Get Involved!    J A M E S   E L L R O Y   "A lot of the art of writing novels is in telling things by implication." Californian author James Ellroy (born Lee Earle Ellroy) is one of America's most celebrated crime writers. Born in 1948, Ellroy has a body of work which contains 13 novels, numerous short stories and essays and has inspired many films and documentaries. Ellroy is perhaps best known for his 1990 novel L. A. Confidential and for the unorthodox circumstances of his childhood which inspired him to become an author of crime fiction. In 1958 when Ellroy was ten, his mother was brutally murdered, a crime which was never solved. His mother's death and The Badge, a collection of police stories given as a gift from his father, were instrumental in provoking his fascination with crime. A petty criminal as a youth, Ellroy later became a golf caddy which in turn influenced his first novel, the 1981 release Brown's Requiem. This was followed by Clandestine and Silent Terror (later published as Killer on the Road) and the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy - Blood on the Moon, Because the Night and Suicide Hill in the 1980s. Though successful novels in their own right, Ellroy's writing became wildly popular with the publication of the 'L. A. Quartet', a series which contains his best known works. The Black Dahlia, published in 1987, brought to term Ellroy's fascination with the case surrounding his mother's murder and that of Elizabeth Short, another murder victim, nicknamed 'the Black Dahlia'. This was followed by The Big Nowhere in 1988, L. A. Confidential in 1990 and White Jazz in 1992. Further books written by Ellroy include American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and his most recent work, Blood's a Rover, published in 2009. Ellroy published an autobiography in 1996 detailing his early life and his abandoned investigations into his mother's murder. L. A. Confidential was adapted into a critically acclaimed film of the same name in 1997, starring Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger. There have been seven other adaptations of Ellroy's novels for the silver screen with mixed commercial success and approval by the author. An adaptation of White Jazz is planned for release in 2012 and has been rumoured to star George Clooney and Chris Pine, made famous in the 2009 Star Trek film release.