Review: Ellroy, My Dark Places (1996)

[truepenny]

My Dark Places by James Ellroy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I don't actually like Ellroy, and I think this book shows me why. It is a memoir, both of Ellroy's childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and of his investigation into his mother's murder. Ellroy is very hard-boiled. He talks tough. It's hard to tell whether he himself is racist, misogynistic, and homophobic, or whether he's acutely self-aware and holding up a mirror to our society. I found My Dark Places less relentlessly noir than L.A. Confidential or the other Ellroy book I've read, the name of which I'm blanking on. My Dark Places acknowledges the existence of people who aren't just in it for what they can get out of it. It's also a procedural, deeply enmeshed in the procedure of searching for Jean Ellroy's murderer, the phone calls and interviews, the chasing down of one dud lead after another.

This is another book about cold cases (both Jean Ellroy's and others that Ellroy comes across as he investigates hers), another book with an inconclusive ending. Ellroy makes it a coherent narrative by playing his own psychodrama out as he learns more about his mother and has to face and accept his own wildly contradictory feelings about her. That story arc has pay-off, in that you feel that Ellroy has actually made progress in dealing with his own demons. (It may also be that we should be suspicious of this narrative tidiness, just as it may be that we should be suspicious of the narrative voice's aggressively transparent honesty.) The book is very fast paced and very readable, and I certainly prefer it to Ellroy's fiction.



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