Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45862 in Books
• Published on: 1997-06-05
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Synopsis
An investigation into the murder of crime writer, James Ellroy's mother. She was murdered in 1958 and the case was never solved, leaving her son to embark on years of petty crime and drinking. Only later, as a writer, did he begin to delve into his past and set out to solve the mystery.

Customer Reviews

Relentless
To better understand (if not enjoy) My Dark Places, I would suggest that you need to have read at least one Ellroy novel. It will help to put this semi-autobiography into perspective, and if you're already an Ellroy fan it will make a great deal more sense. It's an extraordinary piece of work, so ruthlessly exhaustive in its detail that I for one felt almost physically tired by the time I had finished. Not tired of reading the book itself, but tired just to think of the incredible lengths Ellroy went to in order to track down his mother's killer some 37/38 years after her death in 1958. Although the book is dedicated to Ellroy's wife Helen, it could just as well have been dedicated to Bill Stoner, the retired ex-detective who committed himself absolutely to the cause of helping Ellroy in his unusual quest - but this might be an opportunity to mention two of Ellroy's greatest works American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, one a sequel to the other; the latter was in fact dedicated to Stoner and deservedly so.

In one sense I feel that this book was written almost exclusively for Ellroy himself to read, I'm sure that he had little commercial incentive or reasoning to do it. Yet the raw, body-pummelling honesty of the book from start to finish makes for fascinating reading for those who, like myself, have ever wondered what made Ellroy write in the way he does in such classics as The Black Dahlia or The Big Nowhere. I have to admit that the short sentence style adopted in My Dark Places does irritate at times, in spite of the fact that the writer explains this after the end of the story. It gave me the impression that what we are reading, much of the time, are either his own or Stoner's investigatory notes and copied to the page verbatim.

The lasting impression though is the tireless and absolutely relentless commitment to the cause of a murder investigation. Although there are only a handful of characters who appear in the book throughout, there are nevertheless several hundred others who are mentioned during its course, the majority of whom are either related to the victim or are suspected of being so - and ALL of these suspects, no matter how faint their association to the crime might seem, have to be contacted and interviewed. I guess that this gives us an insight into the mechanics of any murder investigation, and how different it is to the relative glamourisation we see on the TV. This book covers, in finite detail, the day-to-day work of a real-life murder investigation, one which was spread well over a year and one which covered every single day of that period. The huge difference of course is that the victim is the investigator's mother, and the death took place most of his life ago.

After closing the last page, I felt that while I didn't exactly understand Ellroy as a personality that much better, I certainly knew him and his motives as a writer more than I had. My Dark Places strips away much of the mystery surrounding him and helps to explain what made him a self-styled specialist of 1950's LA crime fiction; he was a victim of the real thing.

(PS If you get the chance, see the BBC4 'Arena' profile of James Ellroy, a large part of which relates to this book and its subject matter.)

Troubling, dark, compelling
You might wonder how anyone could write publicly about such a brutal murder of his own mother and investigate the case, unflinchingly, with the police years later. However, this memoir is an excellent explanation of why Ellroy was compelled to delve further and further into his own history and attempt to unravel or "solve" his mother's past. He is refreshingly candid about his own failings, motives, and desires. Somehow he manages to maintain his very high standard of writing despite the upsetting material. I found the book gripping and throughly absorbing. Certainly regular readers of Ellroy's fiction will enjoy it, but I'd also recommend it to newcomers provided that they have a strong stomach.

Memoirs of a tortured mind
Unlike most crime writers, Ellroy has actually been through it all, and sometimes his experiences and pain comes through in his other novels. While reading this I was shocked to read about his life of crime. Although it gets tangled up a bit in the middle, it manages to straighten itself out. Ultimately "My Dark Places" is touching and you almost cheer for him when he decides to pick up his life and find his mother's killer.