James Ellroy’s favourite books
The great American crime novelist, author of LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia, picks five of his favourite books. This Storm, the second instalment of his second LA Quartet, has just been published by William Heinemann at £20
The Deceivers by John D. MacDonald, 1958 (out of print). The author of Cape Fear and the Travis McGee series wrote a number of lesserknown novels, such as The
Deceivers and One Monday
We Killed Them All. Don’t be fooled by the titles, they hold up very handily – in a literary sense. They deal with adultery and alcoholism in 1950s America, but have none of the laborious arty-fartiness of Richard Yates’s Revolutionary
Road. They are harrowing, bitter and reek of desperation.
The Gabriel Allon series
Daniel Silva. I’ve read 18 of Mr Silva’s books in the past six months so the plots have melded together, but their great
by and timely theme is the defence of the West. The protagonist, Gabriel Allon, is an Old Master restorer and Mossad hitman. When he’s not bumping off radical Islamists and IRA gunmen, he’s tracking down Nazi plunder or saving the Pope. I am waiting with bated breath for his latest, The New
Girl, which is out this month. The following three crime novels are the big ones for me.
Compulsion by Meyer Levin, 1956 (Fig Tree £10.99) is based on the Leopold and Loeb killing. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were brilliant college graduates who, at 19, decided to perform the perfect motiveless crime and killed a boy named Bobby Franks. Levin deftly portrays affluent Jewish-American life in 1920s Chicago – a crackerjack book.
True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne, 1977 (Da Capo £14.50). One of two enduring works of art on the Black Dahlia murder, my book being the other. Written by the late husband of Joan Didion, it is a fantastical portrayal of LA after WWII. He distorts many of the facts, which allowed me the wiggle room to write my own book ten years later.
Libra by Don DeLillo, 1988 (Penguin £8.99). I credit this novel on the Kennedy assassination for inspiring my entire
Underworld USA Trilogy.