Customer Reviews

My Dark Places

5 star:		(55)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Readers often wonder what makes their favorite writers tick--we want to point to a significant moment in their lives, a single event which made them become writers. When asked this question, most authors tend to shrug it off, saying that they were always compelled to write. James Ellroy would answer the question differently, because he knows the defining event of his personal life and writing career. It happened in 1958, when he was ten: his mother, Jean, was found murdered, a nylon stocking and a cotton cord lashed around her neck. Her corpse was found in an ivy patch near a high school, looking, as Ellroy himself describes it, "like a classic late night body dump." Despite a thorough investigation, her murderer was never found.

When his mother died, Ellroy, the innocent victim of his parent's acrimonious divorce, was already well on the way to perfecting his "Crazy Man Act". Always somewhat of a misfit, Ellroy began to revel in his strangeness under his father's care. After his father's death seven years later, Ellroy spent the next thirteen years in a steep downward spiral, engaging in petty crime, serving jail time, and abusing drugs and alcohol. His only solace during this time were the wild fantasies he concocted in his head, and the crime novels which fueled those fantasies.

During those decades, Ellroy struggled with the memory of "the redhead", as he often refers to his mother. Outwardly professing to hate her, he was confused by his true feelings. These repressed emotions produced a life long obsession with crime and crime fiction, which eventually surfaced in the recurring themes present in many of his novels. "Her death corrupted my imagination and gave me exploitable gifts." His writing, which allowed him to cope with his inner demons, eventually provided a means of reconciling with his mother--he would investigate her death, and attempt to find some answers to what had become the defining mystery of his own life.

In 1994, Ellroy, at the urging of his future wife, decided to try to reopen his mother's police file. With the help of Bill Stoner, a 32 year veteran of the L. A. County Sheriff's Department, Ellroy conducted his own investigation of his mother's death, which ultimately failed to uncover any significant new leads. Although marked by some startling revelations, the investigation was hampered by the passage of time and the dimming memories of the parties involved. The investigation was not a total failure, however, because in trying to find the killer, Ellroy found his mother instead. Now, instead of a fantasy construct, Ellroy has a better idea of who the real Jean Ellroy was.

Ellroy's failure to discover his mother's killer might bother some readers, but shouldn't. My Dark Places is, in the final analysis, Ellroy's attempt to reach out to his mother nearly forty years after her death, and as such, is eminently successful. By writing this memoir, Ellroy resurrects "the redhead" for a brief moment, just long enough to come to appreciate her as a person. Doing so, it seems that he finally comes to terms with her death.

James Ellroy's unique voice in contemporary crime fiction springs from events in his own life which are the basis for My Dark Places. This book reveals a tortured early life overshadowed by the murder of Ellroy's mother and subsequent contact with police along with an adolescent descent into petty crime and drug use. That the person portrayed in these pages manages to sublimate his demons and channel them into some of the best noir fiction ever written, is a remarkable human achievement. Those who love Ellroy's books should read this memoir for the insight into the man it provides and, also, for the pleasure of reading a real life version of what could easily be a typical Ellroy subplot to an L.A. mystery.

Really interesting stuff. Read this and you will know why Ellroy seems stuck in L.A. in another age - and why he can make it come to life with such power.

Ellroy is an internationally best-selling crime author (L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia, etc.). He also grew out of true crime--his mother Jean Ellroy was assaulted, murdered, and had her body dumped in a ditch in 1958, when James was 10 years old. James's father poisoned him against his mother, portraying her as a drunken whore. The boy grew up a troublemaker and serious addict, stealing, burglarizing, lying, using, and living on the streets. Somehow (not covered in this book, to my disappointment), he got his life together, became a star as a crime novelist, and then decided to re-open the 30-year-old unsolved murder of his mother.

Ellroy himself admits that he had dubious motives for re-visiting his mother's murder case--he thought writing an article for GQ about his fascinating past would generate some excellent publicity for his upcoming novel. To his own surprise, Ellroy became engrossed in the dead-end case. He was mystified as the concept of his mother as anything other than a "drunken whore." Ellroy ends up partnering with seasoned homicide detective Bill Toner to re-open then case, investigate 30-year-old leads, trace old witnesses, and garner publicity for potential witnesses to come forward. During the course of the new investigation, Ellroy learns more than he planned about his mother's past, her motivations, and her heritage...which is his own heritage.

The memoir is structured into four parts--(1) a third person, chillingly detailed account of the 1958 murder and ensuing investigation, (2) a first-person account of Ellroy's boyhood, loss of his mother, and descent into criminality and vagrancy, (3) a third-person telling of the career of Bill Stoner and his successes and frustrations in homicide investigations, and, finally, (4) the story of the Ellroy/Stoner partnership in re-opening the murder investigation. Through and through, the book reveals the tedium of chasing down tenuous leads, dealing with crazy tips, canvassing for tiny leads, and the overwhelming dedicated labor of crime detectives. Reading about all the dead leads can exhaust the reader, so one can only imagine how the detectives felt.

Due to the four-part structure, those coming for "true crime" will most like the first and third parts, while anyone who is interested in Ellroy as a person will enjoy the second part, but may well be frustrated that many years of his life immediately before his success as an author are omitted. The fourth part, about the re-opened investigation, is frustrating for both the participants and the reader, and lacks nice, neat Hollywood-style plot developments. But it is real life!

Both autobiography and biography, Ellroy narrates the account of his search for the truth behind his mother's murder in four parts. He begins with a cold journalistic account of the initial investigation that does not quite come off. In part two, he details a protracted adolescence that begins at age 9 when his mother is murdered and does not end until he is 30, in which his existence deteriorates into what call only be called depravity. The third part of the book delves into the life and career of real-life cop Bill Stoner and the beginning of the reinvestigation into the murder with Ellroy. The final part details his mother's life up until her murder, the outcome of the reinvestigation, the last murder case in the career of Stoner, and the trial of O.J. Simpson. This book is a must read for many reasons, but chiefly for its brutal honesty. Firstly, it is an unadulterated autobiographical account of the writer's complicated psychology and his descent into sexual perversion, drug addiction, alcoholism, and petty criminality. Rarely do we admit these to our close family and friends let alone an international audience and certainly not with the perceptiveness and brilliant narrative that Ellroy is capable of. Secondly, nobody knows the mind of cops like Ellroy. His are like no others described in fiction or fact, they are flawed geniuses that demand condemnation and sympathy simultaneously.

"My Dark Places" is about the author's futile search for his mother's killer. It is also a fascinating memoir of one of today's most successful crime writers. Although there is an obvious link between these two themes - a link that Ellroy indulges a very large chunk of his book to - the two parts fail to form a complete marriage. For my money the memoir elements of "Places" are much more compelling and readable. The second half of the book, which documents his work with a retired homicide detective to find the killer, is, well, a little dull. I found myself wishing he would dip back into the well of his youth, when his life was herky-jerky and wild. The investigation into his mother's death is spiked with dead-ends and ponderous soul-searching. And it is dreadfully repetitive at times.

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.

This is a remarkable book. If there were a five-plus rating, that is what I'd give to this astonishing work of art.

James Ellroy's quest is to solve the 1958 murder of his mother. Along the way, we learn about his twisted adolescence, and his brushes with madness, depicted brilliantly.

The reader has to have come to grips with his or her own demons in order to be comfortable reading this book, in that Ellroy's feelings for his murdered mother include the incestuous feelings Freud always claimed we all feel for our opposite sex parents. Ellroy describes these feelings with enormous intensity. In fact, this book is all about intensity, from the first page to the last.

I've read any number of true crime books, and though this is not exactly a true crime read, that's about as close as the reader can come to describing it. In the books I've read, the victims have, unfortunately, not been described intently enough that I've really remembered them after I've finished the book. With My Dark Places, Ellroy so intensely describes his mother, Jean, that she is as real to me as someone I knew intimately.

I think, in fact, that "intimate" describes this entire book. Rather than give away any of the story, let me just say that this book is as intimate as a dark night's sexual encounter with someone dangerous.

This is one of the best books of any kind that I've yet read.

James Ellroy writes dark crime books. This memoir explains why.

When Ellroy was ten, someone strangled his mother and left her body in a car. Her killer has never been found.

The memoir documents Ellroy's life before and after the murder. In denial at first, he escaped into a life of drugs and crime. Later, Ellroy dropped the lifestyle, but maintained a fascination with crime, especially murdered women such as the famous "Black Dahlia."

Ellroy's writing style swings between two extremes. At times he writes with the cool detachment of a detective. For example, he describes in extensive detail the murder scene and the state of his mother's violated body, reporting much as a uninvolved coroner might do. This unemotional style, Ellroy explains, was one method he developed to cope with his mother's death.

In other parts of the memoir, though, Ellroy departs completely from this eerie detachment. He invites the reader into his "dark places," the ugly parts of himself that most people keep hidden. These scenes are some of the most intensely personal, and powerful, in the book. By writing about dark emotions and dark experiences, Ellroy is able to move past them.

Part of the memoir focuses upon Ellroy's attempts, thirty years later, to track down the truth about his mother's life and death. Truth about others, much like the truths about self that Ellroy explores earlier in the memoir, prove difficult to grasp.

"My Dark Places" has become a new classic in the genre of intimate true crime. Think about it: Most true crime is a fairly pedantic and formulaic affair in which a detached observer drops into the investigation (or maybe even the trial) and retells some rewarmed facts more or less accurately.

Very few entries in the true-crime genre have been written by professional storytellers with intimate connections to the crime and its aftermath. Vincent Bugliosi's "Helter Skelter" comes to mind ... and he was the prosecutor, not a relative or friend of the criminals or the victims. Ann Rule's "Stranger Beside Me" is another.

Ellroy's is even more intimate, even more visceral. The son of a murdered woman -- a cold case, nearly 50 years later -- he goes in search of her killer, as well as some of his darker Oedipal tendencies as he tries to explain himself and his mother's murder.

Without giving away the ending, I'll say this: It ends as most of these things do. In that, there's a ring of truth in this "true" crime.

I read the first three books of Ellroy's famous 'LA Quartet' and before I went on to White Jazz (the final) I came upon a copy of 'My Dark Places' in a used book store and couldn't help but start reading it (before WJ which I had on ice). I guess I felt compelled to get a little insight into the man who managed to write these incredible novels. I'll just say that if you are like me, impressed with his work and curious about his notorius past (the murder of his Mother and obsession with the Black Dahlia) then this book is a must read. It helps explain his fixation on crime and how he came through a troubled earlier life living solo in the parks, rooftops, jails and rehabs of L.A. He proves how some great minds are made through adversity. We all have heard the question "If there was one person you could have over to dinner, who would it be?" and my hands down first choice would be Ellroy.