Rating: 
Summary: a cornucopia of crime, cover-ups and corpus delecti
Review: A breezy read; a good introduction for the Ellroy neophyte. A nice melange of stories -- both fiction and non-fiction -- that will whet you appetite for more Ellroy. To the reviewer from Ashland, PA., are you kidding! Please go back and re-read the last chapter, "Let's Twist Again." This is Ellroy at his warmest, most poignant and accessible moment in print.
Rating: 
Summary: I fell in love with Ellroy after reading this book.
Review: After watching him interviewed on E!, I had to check out his book. If anyone is into Los Angeles' History and crime stories, this book is for you. There also some fiction (that seems so real) in the book about some big 50s and 60s icons such as the Rat Pack and friends. Some of the language is before my times (70s child here), but soon you will be hip with lingo, and calling things "boss".
Rating:
Summary: Recommended
Review: Although unquestionably uneven, I liked this book very much. To be sure, "Crime Wave" isn't in the same league as the L.A. quartet, but it's vastly superior to the singularly overrated "American Tabloid."I'm curious: Where on earth does Ellroy get his Kenneth Anger-like information? For instance, I've never heard that Lana Turner and Ava Gardner "liked to lez once in a soft sapphic moon" (though apparently not with each other). Fact? Fiction? Fantasy? What tidbit will appear in Ellroy's next book? Jayne Mansfield romancing a Great Dane?
Rating:
Summary: Not his best work
Review: As with another reviewer I am a huge Ellroy fan. I have read everything he has written. To be completely honest I did not like many of the sections in this book. The two stories dealing with the Hush Hush editor were forced and too filled with aliteration. While it was obviously Ellroy's intent to write the stories as Gretchell would have done in his magazine, the style crippled Ellroy's talent. In short by tyring to write like an annoying parasite, Ellroy created two annoying stories.
That being said, if you are an Ellroy fan buy it, Ellroy writting is like a certain sex act, even when it's bad it's still very good. If you have not read Ellroy before, pass this one by and start the L.A. saga books and by purchasing "The Black Dhalia"
Rating:
Summary: The Master of the "Dark Underbelly"
Review: Cities have always brought out the worst in people, regardless of how glamourous or charming it may seem. No writer seems to understand this more than James Ellroy. Every City has a history that it's not proud of, that you'll never find in the tourist brochures. Mr. Ellroy reminds us that the past cannot be changed no matter how much you wish it too. Los Angeles is no different. From the Black Dahlia murder to O.J.'s famous White Bronco ride on the expressway, he goes to great length to show the dark side of "The City of Angels". And once you understand it's history, it makes recent events there(such as the Nationally known tales of Police Corruption) take on whole new meanings and understanding. Every city, from Boston to Seattle has these horrible tales. Thank god James Ellroy is here to remind us of them.
Rating:
Summary: This is possibly the best book I have ever read.
Review: Crime wave is like summing up all the glamor style and glitz of 1950s L.A, all your supposedly "bread and butter" heros and then telling you things you wouldn't even imagine the lowest of the low would do. Sure you may have heared the rumors but not them! Glamour meets grit. You don't even have to like crime novels to love this book, familiar stars and non-entities crop up and Hollywood and crime go together like... well Hollywood and crime. So buy the book sit back put your old Dean Martin records on and revel in the intrigue.
Rating:
Summary: This book'll show you some bad Juju, Jasper...
Review: Dig it dad: James Ellroy is at the top of the heap when it comes to writing crime fiction, because he's not afraid to look at the bottom of the barrel. CRIMEWAVE is another brutal look at Los Angeles in all of it's sordid glory in an era when there was a reason that foot patrolman were called beat cops. From the stark, icy descriptions of malevolent mayhem most of his readers will never see, to his diabolically derived detachment, the demon dog delivers a devastating package with every pulsating page...so put down the crack, jack and pick up your slacks. The demon dog wants to take you down to places that will leave you trembling with trepidation and delirious with desperation.
Rating:
Summary: Ellroy fans unite!
Review: Either you love him or you hate him. I love him. He's like lemonade in the summer. With luck, Ellroy will keep them coming, even if he's left the LA series.
Rating:
Summary: Ellroy fans unite!
Review: Either you love him or you hate him. I love him. He's like lemonade in the summer. With luck, Ellroy will keep them coming, even if he's left the LA series.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting Essays, Repetitive Fictions
Review: Ellroy's collected writings for GQ magazine from 1993'99 are collected in this hodgepodge of essays and three short stories. For those (like me) who've never read Ellory before and want to test the waters of his LA-centric writings, this seems to be as good a place as any. The first three essays are grouped under the theme "Unsolved". The first is about his own mother's murder in an LA suburb of El Monte in 1958 and was expanded into the book My Dark Places. The second recounts the unsolved murder of a woman in El Monte in 1973, and the third retells the death of a smalltime druggie actress in 1963. Next come two "LA Confidential" era stories narrated by Hush-Hush editor Danny Getchell (the Danny Devito character in the film). These stories are virtual carbon copies in terms of subject matter (sex, murder, blackmail, crooked cops, degenerate celebrities) and style (period slang and alliteration galore). While I'll agree that Ellroy's prose is punchy and full of juice, he's over-dependent on alliteration. Once or twice a page is plenty, once or twice a paragraph is overkill. Next is an essay about the life and times of a '50s teen idol accordion player named Dick Contino. This is a fairly interesting piece revealing the fleeting nature of celebrity and the patriotic fervor of the '50s. Ellroy tracked him down and then wrote a 57-page novella with him as the hero narrator. Unfortunately, "Hollywood Shakedown" is exactly like the two previous Hush-hush stories, which if you like that kind of thing is fine I suppose. Personally, I grew to find them tiresome and repetitive. Part of the problem is that all his characters speak the same clipped hard-boiled way in every story. The most egregious case being the accordion player Contino who in his narrative uses plenty of alliteration, exactly as Danny Getchell does in the previous stories. Certain words and phrases crop up over and over throughout the story, becoming more drab with every use, for example, sapphic, tumescent, SIN-sational, to name just the first three that come to mind. The final section is perhaps my favorite, including a sharp essay on O.J. Simpson; an engaging profile of the L.A. County Sheriff's Homicide Bureau; a piece on Curtis Hanson (director of LA Confidential); and best of all, Ellroy's reminiscences about his LA junior high school. This last piece, in which he vividly recreates the world of his youth in early 1960s LA and then organizes a junior high reunion is easily the warmest in the book. This and the O.J. Simpson piece are the only two in the whole book in which one gets a sense of Ellroy as a regular human (in the O.J. piece he's an angry human), albeit one still perhaps unhealthily obsessed with the past. All in all, the collection certainly doesn't inspire me to pursue Ellroy's fiction, but I am interested in reading more of his essays.
| 
