James Ellroy

James Ellroy, born Lee Earle Ellroy in Los Angeles on 4 March 1948, is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. His father was an accountant and a onetime business manager of Rita Hayworth, and his mother was raped and murdered in 1958 when he was ten years old; the case was never solved, and the English Wikipedia article ties it to his later fixation on the murder of Elizabeth Short, the young woman nicknamed the Black Dahlia. His early novels earned a cult following among crime fiction buffs, and he won much greater success and critical acclaim with the L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz.