Genre: True Crime/Memoir
Pages: 427
I've been looking for a copy of My Dark Places for a few years. My everything-James-Ellroy-related has been growing steadily since I have read L.A Confidential sometime around 2005, but since The Black Dahlia flopped in the theaters, the world seems to think otherwise. So it's getting increasingly hard to find Ellroy's material. I had to resort to the magic of Amazon to bring Ellroy's first memoir to my doorstep. Fortunately, the read was well worth the wait. My Dark Places is one of the best, if not THE best James Ellroy book I have read so far. Crime writers are usually anything but vulnerable, so reading Ellroy's most private thoughts, while he looks at photos of his dead mother has something extremely fresh and fearless to me.
Another peculiar trait of his memoir is the way it's constructed. There are four, very different parts. First, "The Redhead", a third person account of the murder and the first-hand investigation of Jean Ellroy's murder. It's about eighty pages long and it's the most conventional piece of the book. It reads like James Ellroy on his best writing day. Then, "The Boy In The Picture" switches to a first person narration of Ellroy's development into adulthood under the tutelage of his unstable father. This is a manic read, a demented novella that chronicles the distorted perception of a confused boy that desperately seeks to understand the importance of what happened to him. Then the narration switches back to the third person again for "Stoner", the third part, about Bill Stone, the investigator that would help Ellroy investigate his mother's murder. Reading about his investigations and his "ghosts" provided a wide array of subplots that the best novels can only dream to mesh in together. Then there's of course the fourth part "Geneva Hilliker Ellroy" which is the confrontation witht he past and the investigation itself.
There are so many things going on a once here. Intimate memories or lost, lust and thoroughly fucking up. Some terrific true crime stories, peppered over the four hundred pages of the memoir like an exotic topping. The story of two men, haunted by crime, who would work together and become close friends, sharing a lot more than the chase of a long forgotten culprit. It's weird if you say it like this, but the murder of Jean Ellroy engendered a literary revolution. Noir would have never been what it is today if Ellroy never would've picked up a pen to hack the genre into pieces and built something new. My Dark Places traces this revolution back to its inception and gathers all the variables that were put in action for this revolution to happen. That's why My Dark Places is a lot more than a memoir or a true crime novel. It's a story of beating the odds and metamorphosis of negative events into something that changes the landscape of contemporary literature. James Ellroy transformed a life of misery into a work of a great scope and magnitude. That's how good the guy is.
Now, I'm wondering why My Dark Places occupies such a strong place in Ellroy's literary cannon. That's not what memoirs SHOULD be. They should be an outlook on a life of challenges and achievements. It shouldn't be one of your best books. The answer about why does it stands above the L.A Quartet (in my humble opinion anyway) is rather simple. Ellroy delayed the literary confrontation for more than fifteen years under the form of terrific noir fiction, but it needed to fall. Shit needed to hit the fan and it did. I feel that Ellroy has neutralized his biggest weakness with this memoir, the emotional involvement. During the L.A Quartet, he buried himself under the weight of his research and his setting. His characters were incredibly well defined, but they seemed so far away. And so did their writer. Part of the excitement I had after closing My Dark Places was to know that American Tabloid is waiting for me in the TBR pile. This is the moment where James Ellroy brought classic crime to its knees. It's a read that anybody with the stomach for crime fiction should appreciate to its fullest. The best book I have read in 2011 so far.
