The L.A. Quartet

Here in one volume is James Ellroy's first great body of work, an epic re-envisioning of postwar Los Angeles-etched in red and black and film-noir grays. The Black Dahlia. depicts the secret infrastructure of L. A. 's most sensational murder case. A young cop morphs into obsessed lover and lust-crazed avenger. The Dahlia claims him. She is the deus ex machina of a boomtown in extremis. The cop's rogue investigation is a one-way ticket to hell. The Big Nowhere. blends the crime novel and the political novel. It is winter, 1950-and the L. A. County Grand Jury is out to slam movieland Reds. It's a reverential shuck-and the three cops assigned to the job are out to grab all the glory they can. A series of brutal sex killings intervenes, and the job goes all-the-way bad. L. A. Confidential. is the. great novel of Los Angeles in the 1950s. Political corruption. Scandal-rag journalism. Bad racial juju and gangland wars. Six local stiffs slaughtered in an all-night hash house. The glorious and overreaching LAPD on an unprecedented scale. White Jazz. gives us the tortured confession of a corrupt cop going down for the count. He's a slumlord, a killer, a parasitic exploiter. He's a pawn in a series of police power plays and starting to see that he's being had. He's just met a woman. Thus, he's determined to claw his way out of the horrifying world he's created-and he's determined to tell us everything. The L. A. Quartet. is a groundbreaking work of American popular fiction.