Shortlisted for the H.R.F. Keating Award 2020
James Ellroy's identity as a crime writer is rooted in his extraordinary life story and relationship with his home city of Los Angeles. Beginning with the unsolved murder of his mother, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, in 1958, Ellroy's early life played a large role in shaping his obsessions with murder, the criminal underworld of L.A. and the redemptive power of the feminine. Ellroy's life could be seen as a brutal, visceral and emotionally exhausting realisation of the American Dream, a theme he has explored in his writing to the extent that he is credited with reinventing crime fiction.
The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy's Noir Worldis an in-depth, scholarly study of the work of James Ellroy, featuring leading Ellroy scholars such as Anna Fl?gge, Jim Mancall and Rodney Taveira. Moving from Ellroy's early detective novels to his later epic works of historical fiction, it explores how Ellroy found his place in the history of the genre by building on, and then surpassing, the works of authors who influenced him such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Joseph Wambaugh. It also examines Ellroy's impact on contemporary writers and on the cultural perception of L.A., which has been his legacy through the L.A. Quartet novels.
The 'Big Somewhere' is not a geographical location, but a conglomeration of the cinematic, historical and fictional worlds that influenced Ellroy, from film noir to the Kennedy era in American politics, and on which he, in turn, has left his mark.
Steven Powellis an Honorary Fellow in the English Department at the University of Liverpool, UK. He is the editor of
Conversations with James Ellroy(2012) and
100 American Crime Writers(2012). His most recent work is
James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction(2016).
[Ellroy's] unique qualities as a crime writer are well captured, and cogently analysed, inThe Big Somewhere& I tl³I
![The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy's Noir World [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/3/0/6/2_4259909.jpg "The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy's Noir World [Paperback]")