Dark Places: Crime and Politics in the Personal Noir of James Ellroy

James Ellroy has mined the darkest corners of the American experience, public and private, to paint a landscape of corrupt hearts, minds, and institutions. Ellroy is particularly notable for exploring the connection between the murder of his own mother, when he was ten years old, and his troubled adolescence and early adulthood struggles with addiction. ＂Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively,＂ he wrote in the memoir My Dark Places. Dark Places: Crime and Politics in the Personal Noir of James Ellroy will explore connections between politics, art, history, memory, and crime -- Ellroy’s personal noir. The editors here present an interdisciplinary collection of essays, each with insight and argument into the pressurized, and at times, highly personal literary production of one of the most critically and commercially successful authors of our time. These contributions, scholarly yet accessible, offer compelling and provocative maps into the terrain of Ellroy’s fiction and non-fiction, drawing focus as well on film adaptations of his work.

Joseph Romance is independent scholar who taught political science and political theory for over 20 years at Drew University and Fort Hays State University. Darrell A. Hamlin is associate professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Center for Civic Leadership at Fort Hays State University.