Crime Wave: Reportage and Fiction from the Underside of L.A., Paperback

Los Angeles. In no other city do sex, celebrity, money, and crime exert such an irresistible magnetic field. And no writer has mapped that field with greater savagery and savvy than James Ellroy. With this fever-hot collection of reportage and short fiction, he returns to his native habitat and portrays it as a smog-shrouded netherworld where"every third person is a peeper, prowler, pederast, or pimp."

From the scandal sheets of the 1950s to this morning's police blotter, Ellroy reopens true crimes and restores human dimensions to their victims. Sublimely, he resurrects the rag Hush-Hush magazine. And in a baroquely plotted novella of slaughter and corruption he enlists the forgotten luminaries of a lost Hollywood. Shocking, mesmerizing, and written in prose as wounding as an ice pick, Crime Wave is Ellroy at his best.

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L. A. Quartet novels--The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L. A. Confidential, and White Jazz--were international bestsellers. His novel American Tabloid was Time magazine's Novel of the Year for 1995; his memoir My Dark Places was Time magazine Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Ellroy is a Writer at Large for GQ.