Abstract
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He grew up in the epicentre of American noir at the height of the classic film noir period: ‘I remember feeling that things were going on outside the frame of what I was seeing. The language I got partly from my father, who swore a lot. It was an older L.A., a man’s L.A., where everybody smoked cigarettes and ate steak and went to fights’ (Kihn 1992: 32). This experiential, inchoate knowledge of Los Angeles was to prove Ellroy’s most valuable education. He absorbed what he saw at home and on the streets, and culturally he gravitated towards this world more than any other: ‘My passion for movies does not extend beyond their depiction of crime. My filmic pantheon rarely goes past 1959 and the end of the film noir age’ (Ellroy 1997a: xvii).
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© 2016 Steven Powell
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Powell, S. (2016). Introduction. In: James Ellroy. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490834_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490834_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56427-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-49083-4
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