{"product_id":"crime-wave-isbn-9780375704710","title":"Crime Wave","description":"Los Angeles.  In no other city do sex, celebrity, money, and crime exert such an irresistible magnetic field.  And no writer has mapped that field with greater savagery and savvy than James Ellroy.  With this fever-hot collection of reportage and short fiction, he returns to his native habitat and portrays it as a smog-shrouded netherworld where\"every third person is a peeper, prowler, pederast, or pimp.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom the scandal sheets of the 1950s to this morning's police blotter, Ellroy reopens true crimes and restores human dimensions to their victims.  Sublimely, he resurrects the rag \u003ci\u003eHush-Hush\u003c\/i\u003e magazine.  And in a baroquely plotted novella of slaughter and corruption he enlists the forgotten luminaries of a lost Hollywood.  Shocking, mesmerizing, and written in prose as wounding as an ice pick, \u003cb\u003eCrime Wave\u003c\/b\u003e is Ellroy at his best.\"One of the best Amercan writers of our time.\" --\u003cb\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A blood poet who writes as chain saws crank, Ellroy has vigorously redefined the well-shadowed turf of contemporary crime fiction.\" --\u003cb\u003eThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Nobody in this generation matches the breadth and depth of James Ellroy's way with noir.\" --\u003cb\u003eThe Detroit News\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"His spare noir style . . . hits like a cleaver but . . . is honed like a scalpel.\" --\u003cb\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/b\u003eJames Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948.  His L. A. Quartet novels--\u003cb\u003eThe Black Dahlia\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eThe Big Nowhere\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eL. A. Confidential\u003c\/b\u003e, and \u003cb\u003eWhite Jazz\u003c\/b\u003e--were international bestsellers.  His novel \u003cb\u003eAmerican Tabloid\u003c\/b\u003e was \u003cb\u003eTime\u003c\/b\u003e magazine's Novel of the Year for 1995; his memoir \u003cb\u003eMy Dark Places\u003c\/b\u003e was \u003cb\u003eTime\u003c\/b\u003e magazine Best Book of the Year and a \u003cb\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/b\u003e Notable Book of the Year.  Ellroy is a Writer at Large for \u003cb\u003eGQ\u003c\/b\u003e.The police reconstructed the crime.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy mother went out drinking Saturday night. She was seen at the Desert Inn bar in El Monte with a dark-haired white man and a blonde woman. My mother and the man left the bar around 10 P.M.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA group of Little Leaguers discovered the body. My mother had been strangled at an unknown location and dumped into some bushes next to the athletic field at Arroyo High School, a mile and a half from the Desert Inn.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe clawed her assailant's face bloody. The killer had pulled off one of her stockings and tied it loosely around her neck postmortem.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI went to live with my father. I forced some tears out that Sunday--and none since.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy flight landed early. L.A. looked surreal, and inimical to the myth town of my books.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI checked in at the hotel and called Sergeant Stoner. We made plans to meet the following day. He gave me directions to the Homicide Bureau; earthquake tremors had ravaged the old facility and necessitated a move.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSergeant McComas wouldn't be there. He was recuperating from open-heart surgery, a classic police-work by-product.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI told Stoner I'd pop for lunch. He warned me that the file might kill my appetite.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI ate a big room-service dinner. Dusk hit--I looked out my window and imagined it was 1950-something.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI set my novel \u003cb\u003eClandestine\u003c\/b\u003e in 1951. It's a chronologically altered, heavily fictionalized account of my mother's murder. The story details a young cop's obsession: linking the death of a woman he had a one-night stand with to the killing of a redheaded nurse in El Monte. The supporting cast includes a 9-year-old boy very much like I was at that age.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI gave the killer my father's superficial attributes and juxtaposed them against a psychopathic bent. I have never understood my motive for doing this.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI called the dead nurse Marcella De Vries. She hailed from my mother's hometown: Tunnel City, Wisconsin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI did not research that book. Fear kept me from haunting archives and historical sites. I wanted to contain what I knew and felt about my mother. I wanted to acknowledge my blood debt and prove my imperviousness to her power by portraying her with coldhearted lucidity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSeveral years later, I wrote \u003cb\u003eThe Black Dahlia.\u003c\/b\u003e The title character was a murder victim as celebrated as Jean Ellroy was ignored. She died the year before my birth, and I understood the symbiotic cohesion the moment I first heard of her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Black Dahlia was a young woman named Elizabeth Short. She came west with fatuous hopes of becoming a movie star. She was undisciplined, immature, and promiscuous. She drank to excess and told whopping lies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSomeone picked her up and tortured her for two days. Her death was as hellishly protracted as my mother's was gasping and quick. The killer cut her in half and deposited her in a vacant lot twenty miles west of Arroyo High School.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe killing is still unsolved.Author of L.A. Confidential and My Dark Places","brand":"Vintage Crime\/Black Lizard","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300673278181,"sku":"NP9780375704710","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375704710.jpg?v=1767724255","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/crime-wave-isbn-9780375704710","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}