The Best American Noir of the Century

James Ellroy (1948-) was born Lee Earle Ellroy in Los Angeles. When he was ten years old his mother was murdered; the killer was never apprehended. There were some similarities in the case to the famous murder of Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia, and both murders obsessed Ellroy for many years. He wrote a fictionalized version of the Betty Short murder, The Black Dahlia (1987), which became a New York Times bestseller, and a memoir of his fifteen-month search for his mother’s killer, My Dark Places (1996). As a young man, Ellroy lived a life of petty crime, alcoholism, and drug use, cleaning up his act in the late 1970s to produce his first novel, Brown’s Requiem (1981); his second book, Clandestine (1982), was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Paperback Original. His first hardcover book, Blood on the Moon (1984), began the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy. The masterly Black Dahlia was the first novel in what Ellroy called the L.A. Quartet, which later included The Big Nowhere (1988), L.A. Confidential (1990), and White Jazz (1992). Two of the books became big-budget movies. L.A. Confidential (1997), a critical and commercial success, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. The Black Dahlia (2006), on the other hand, was critically savaged, successfully warning potential audiences away.

Although he later claimed a career change from crime novels to big, ambitious political books, his Underworld trilogy, which he described as “a secret history of America in the mid-to-late twentieth century” — American Tabloid (i995)> The Cold Six Thousand (2001), and Blood’s a Rover (2009) — is heavily spiked with dark crimes and violence. Described as “the American Dostoevsky” by Joyce Carol Oates, Ellroy is arguably the most influential American crime writer of the late twentieth century; his powerful, relentlessly dark prose style of staccato sentences, infused with uniquely American slang that hammers the senses, has been emulated by any number of tough-writing young crime writers.

“Since I Don’t Have You” was first published in A Matter of Crime, volume 4 (1988). It served as the basis for an episode of Showtime’s series Fallen Angels, airing on September 26,1993.