(born 1948) Novelist and memoirist, darker than noir. Ellroy has been the obsessive investigator and recreator of 1950s Los Angeles, CA—violent, verbal, dominated by sex and power, in novels like The Black Dahlia (1987) and LA Confidential (1987, film 1997). In soulsearching memoirs, he has explored the unsolved murder of his own mother and other intersections of his own life, crime and the city (see his Crime Wave (1995)). Weaving fragmented Hollywood fictions and realities and grittier racialized Los Angeles, Ellroy deconstructs the city’s iconic meanings, dark sides to a city of the sun.