Brown's Requiem
Before he began to remap the geography of the crime novel and venture  out into the darkestnoirnight of them all withL.A. Confidential,The Black Dahlia,White Jazz, andAmerican Tabloid, James Ellroy started his career with this powerful but basically straightforward book about Los Angeles private eye Fritz Brown. At first glance, the story of an investigation into a crooked golf tournament that opens up to include arson and murder could be just another work by any one of the dozens of good writers who have used Southern California as a metaphor for the decline and fall of civilization. But behind the terse prose, astute readers will soon begin to hear something else--the increasingly loud clamor of a cry of pain that will eventually become the barely manageable madness of Ellroy's later books.--Dick Adler