James Ellroy, a native of Los Angeles, is a master of noir crime fiction. Ellroy has up close and personal knowledge of the world of crime, his life shadowed by a gruesome event: the unsolved murder of his mother when he was a child. Nearly all of his writing is set in Los Angeles, in the rough, racist, pre-Miranda Los Angeles of the decade following the Second World War. He is author of the L. A. Quartet novels: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L. A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He is also the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy– American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s a Rover. His memoir, My Dark Places, was named as Time magazine’s Best Book of The Year.