Much of the memoir is taken up with a detailed account of the doomed investigation. What he has produced can't be neatly categorized. The year is 1958. She has been strangled with her own nylon stocking after a sexual encounter that may or may not have been consensual. An investigation begins that is unbearably suspenseful, not because the police are closing in on the killer but because they are not.
Leads go nowhere.
A certain swarthy man, the primary suspect, seems to disappear in smoke. Along the way, there is some first-rate reporting on the various police and sheriffs' departments that brought us Mark Fuhrman. Thirty-five years after the fact, Mr. Ellroy enlists the help of a retired Los Angeles detective to reopen the case. Predictably, the investigation yields even less than it did on the first go-round, although the detective seems a pleasant and stable friend for Mr. Ellroy to have. And the nobility of the enterprise seems compromised when production teams from ''Unsolved Mysteries'' and ''Day One'' appear on the scene.