num_pages: 431
description: "Astonishing . . . original, daring, brilliant." --Philadelphia InquirerIn 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb.  Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running.  He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself.   In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten--and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence. It's hard to imagine a more psychologically treacherous, more self-exposing way in which to write about true crime. The New York Times calls it a "strenuously involving book.... Early on, Mr. Ellroy makes a promise to his dead mother that seems maudlin at first: 'I want to give you breath.' But he's done just that and--on occasion--taken ours away."
language: English
title: My Dark Places
titlecomplete: My Dark Places
genres: Mystery, Biography, True Crime, History, Autobiography, Crime, Noir, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Memoir
ratings_count: 6953
awards: awardedAt: 883641600000
name: Deutscher Krimi Preis
category: 3. Platz International
publisher: Vintage