My Dark Places

Rating:
Summary: Dark, obsessive, intriguing.
Review:

Imagine you're ten years old, returning home from a weekend with your father. Cops are there to greet you. Your mother's dead. Murdered. They're never going to find the killer. There's never going to be a clear picture of what happened the night she died. And you're going to spend the rest of your life wondering who ... wondering why.

If you love Ellroy, you'll love this book. All the classic Ellroy touches are there. His twisted love for L.A., the crazed staccato authorial voice, like Jack Webb on crystal meth, the obssesion with doomed women. If you've wondered what makes Ellroy tick, you'll find answers here. Maybe more answers than you're prepared to know. It's a hot ride into the L.A. night. The car door is open. All you need to do is get in.

One note, if you don't know Ellroy, this one isn't for you. Try his masterpiece, "The Black Dahlia" first, or one of the early books -- "Because the Night" or "Brown's Requiem." If you like what you read, finish the books in the L.A. Quartet and then move on to "My Dark Places".

Rating:
Summary: Strangely exhilarating
Review: I love Ellroy, but I don't know if he is trying to make us laugh all the time. Even in the most disturbing parts of this book, there is some perversity or twist of his now spare writing style that has me on the floor laughing, such as the segment when his paranoid psychosis has got the better of him in a dingy hotel room and he thinks his neighbor is poisoning him and reading his mind...unfortunately, I know what the feels like, and it makes me laugh all the harder. There is some magic to his style cultivated since "LA Confidential" that grabs you sexually, violently, hilariously and poignantly, something not even the great Jim Thompson was able to do on each and every page. I only scanned the investigation parts at first, but was totally absorbed by his memoirs. What a great book. Let's hope someday he can find out who killed his mother.

Rating:
Summary: Quicky
Review: I am writing just to quickly recommend this book. James Ellroy has a vast imagination to go with an experienced life. To say the least he has lived a full life with some fascinating stories.

"My Dark Places" is an entertaining book that keeps you wondering what is next. From the death of his mother to his fantasies about her, this book is full of first hand vivid explanations into the mind of an unusual character that happens to be true.

Rating:
Summary: a true crime story and autobiography ... a bit too much
Review: 'My Dark Places' is a most interesting read, and would have been a good book if the author could decide on writing either a true crime story (about the murder of his mother) or an autobiography. Unfortunately the combination of the two makes it to be a but jumbley, with neither theme being fully exploited. The fact that the author, James Ellroy, is a very popular crime writer adds an enticing twist ... and the man can write. But in the end 'My Dark Places' left me with the impression that the book served as primarily some sort of soul-searching exercise by Ellroy rather than something to be enjoyed by the reader.

Oh, there are some interesting moments. The murder of Jean Ellroy is graphically recounted. James Ellroy's perspective of this murder, both as a boy when it happened and as an adult researching the case (..still unsolved), is intriguing and unexpected. However Ellroy also goes into great detail of his rather wasted youth ... it seems he was a total mess for half his life. This was not too interesting, and his transformation from dunken hobo to crime writer extraordinary and member of the establishment is not really addressed. So I felt this entire element was a real waste.


Bottom line: a very mixed bag. Certainly a must read for Ellroy fans. However I'm not so sure if anyone else while find value in reading it.

Rating:
Summary: Stunning, Stirring, and Sublime
Review: A disturbing, involving, enrossing, ride through a man's hellish life and times. And search for love (of all kinds). A rip roaring detective yarn. Ellroy's writing is like Hemingway on crack...he searches for the killer of his mother and tries to find her (and his) soul in the process. Many of the reviews here do justice this extraordinary book. It moved me. It scared me. It fascinated me. Crime to Ellroy is lifeblood. We see where it all began. He is one of the great America writers.

Rating:
Summary: Living With the Dead
Review: The places James Ellroy boldly takes us ARE, without exaggeration, dark and scary and kind of banal which is why they're so wierd. I started to wonder whom he imagined his readers were, given that his language and approach are startling and bone-crunching, but I don't think he has an imagined audience. If there is any at all, it's himself. He's writing for himself to get it out of his head and it's a bold expurgation.

The redhead is James Ellroy's mother who was murdered on a dark road outside an El Monte high school in 1958 when the author was 10 and the victim was 42 years old. Confused and disoriented as only a 10 year old from a raging broken home can be, Ellroy grows up - or at least advances in years since real maturity comes later - perversely relieved to be rid of his mother and develops major addiction problems and asocial behavior. In recovery terms, much of the book seems to serve as Ellroy's fourth step (a moral inventory of oneself) and is both oddly delicious and repellant. The real punch comes when Ellroy is determined to find his mother's killer, the so-called Swarthy Man, but in fact begins to discover who that redhead is and how she found herself on a dark road in El Monte after a Saturday night of bar-hopping.

No criticism or re-interpretations can be proffered. The guy lost his mother to an unknown murderer. Who can fully understand what that means?

Rating:
Summary: Gripping!
Review: James Ellroy may be Amrica's most talented crime writer. In his novels there are no good and evil characters. Everyone is flawed to some degree. Good and evil are more like shades of gray, rather than black and white. As James Ellroy goes back into his childhood to write about, and attempt to solve, the murder of his mother, he gives an almost autobiographical account of his life, especially his early years. Ellroy describes his guilty feelings at the excitement that he would permanently live with his father after his mother was murdered. It appears that when she was alive, he felt no love for his mother, in fact he hated her lifestyle. Ellroy may be a little to blunt in his criticisms of his mother, given his own penchant for booze and sex. Ellroy temed up with a soon to retire LA County Sheriff's Detective, and snooped around the Jean Ellroy case, as well as another unsolved case. This book gives an interesting account of growing up in Los Angeles and the surrounding communities. Everything about this book was fascinating, and I could not put it down. Like his characters, Ellroy and his family are neither clearly good or evil, but more like shades of gray.

Rating:
Summary: Murder of author's mother
Review: Over the years, crime writer James Ellroy has put up a macho front about the brutal death of his mother Jean, aka Geneva, in 1958, referring to it as "the whack" and "the Geneva snuff". His mother was raped and strangled, her body dumped near a school in El Monte, CA, a run-down white-trash suburb of L.A. The crime remained unsolved.

Never sure if he was actually sad at his mother's death--his parents were separated and his mother was given custody, even though he wanted to live with his father--Elroy became obsessed by a more celebrated unsolved murder, that of Elizabeth Short, the so-called Black Dahlia. After years of petty crime, drug abuse and alcoholism, he became a successful writer, using the Black Dahlia case as the basis for his bestselling novel of the same name, in which he finally perfected his ultra-hardboiled, violent and cynical style, looking into L.A.'s corrupt heart of darkness.

My Dark Places grew out of a story he wrote for GQ magazine in which he went to see the police files on his mother's slaying, which included graphic photographs and autopsy reports. Ellroy employed a former homicide detective to re-investigate his mother's murder, going over some of the suspects, witnesses and detectives from the original case. More importantly, Ellroy, for the first time, re-examined his own feelings for his mother, looking into her secret life after years of having abandoned her.

This account is genuinely appalling and, unlike the novels, Ellroy makes no secret of the pain, frustration, fear, sense of loss and the knowledge that he himself has been wrong about his mother for most of his life. My Dark Places is one of the most courageous books ever written.