Publication Order of Second L.A. Quartet (L.A. Quintet) Books
Perfidia
2014
This Storm
2019
The Enchanters
2023
Red Sheet
2026
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
Brown’s Requiem
1981
Clandestine
1982
Silent Terror / Killer on the Road
1986
Widespread Panic
2021
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
Shakedown
2012
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
Hollywood Nocturnes / Dick Contino’s Blues and Other Stories
1994
Crime Wave
1999
Destination: Morgue!
2004
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
My Dark Places
1996
The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women
2010
LAPD ’53 (With: Glynn Martin)
2015
About James Ellroy
James Ellroy (born Lee Earle Ellroy in Los Angeles on 4 March 1948) is an American crime writer best known for the L.A. Quartet, which includes “The Black Dahlia” and “L.A. Confidential”, and for the Underworld USA Trilogy, which he describes as a secret history of America in the mid to late twentieth century.
His parents divorced in 1954 and he moved with his mother to El Monte, California. In June 1958, when he was ten, she was murdered, and the case has never been solved. Ellroy was expelled from Fairfax High School, spent three months in the US Army, and passed his teens and twenties drinking heavily, committing minor crimes and often sleeping rough. After a spell in jail and a serious bout of pneumonia he stopped drinking and took work as a golf caddie, which left his afternoons free to write.
His first novel, “Brown’s Requiem” (1981), drew on his caddying years. “Clandestine” and “Silent Terror” (later reissued as “Killer on the Road”) followed, along with three novels about Lloyd Hopkins, a brilliant but disturbed LAPD robbery-homicide detective.
Wider success came with the L.A. Quartet. “The Black Dahlia” (1987) joins the real 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short to a fictional story about two police officers on the case. The clipped, telegraphic prose of his later books dates from “L.A. Confidential”, when his editor asked him to cut more than a hundred pages and he removed words rather than subplots. “American Tabloid” (1995) opened the Underworld USA Trilogy and was Time magazine’s fiction book of the year. His memoir “My Dark Places” (1996) covers his mother’s murder and his own attempt, with detective Bill Stoner, to reopen the case.
Film versions include “Cop” (1988, from “Blood on the Moon”), “L.A. Confidential” (1997), “Brown’s Requiem” (1998) and Brian De Palma’s “The Black Dahlia” (2006), and Ellroy co-wrote the 2008 film “Street Kings”. He was named a Grand Master at the 2015 Edgar Awards.
“Perfidia” (2014) and “This Storm” (2019) began a second Los Angeles sequence set during the Second World War. In 2023 Ellroy said the planned quartet would become a quintet, with “The Enchanters” as its third book. “Widespread Panic” (2021) is narrated by Freddy Otash, a real-life Hollywood private investigator, and Otash returns in “Red Sheet”, published by Knopf in June 2026 and set in Los Angeles just after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
