My Dark Places

By James Ellroy, Knopf, 359 p., $25

This is a heartrending memoir. At 10, James Ellroy loses his mother, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, to an unknown murderer; at the time, he tells us, it seems like a reprieve — at last, he is allowed to live with his favored parent. Over the next few years, he loses her further to his father's version of what must have happened: basically, his father says, the slutty drunk deserved it.

Living in semi-squalid Los Angeles with his father, he becomes obsessed with the Black Dahlia murder case and an avid reader of crime stories; attention-hungry, he plays the provocateur and has only losers for friends. In early adolescence, he fuses the Dahlia, his mother, and his female classmates into a rich fantasy life: "The Dahlia was always with me. Real girls vied for my heart. A killer was stalking all the girls I grooved on. Jill, Kathy and Donna lived in great peril." Later, he stalks the girls he secretly loved in high school, entering their wealthy bedrooms when they are gone and stealing their underwear. His father dies seven years after the murder of his mother, the shine of the uncustodial parent long since worn off.

For over 30 years, he does not, very often, think of his mother, though, as he says here, speaking of his pre-teen reading, "Every book I read was a twisted homage to her. Every mystery solved was my love for her in ellipsis." Newly sober after a lost (truly lost) decade of speed and alcohol addiction, he begins to write his crime novels, improving with each one and writing as if to make up for lost time. The Black Dahlia seals his reputation and is his first bestseller. Several novels and two marriages later, he begins to wonder more consciously: whodunnit, all those years ago? His wife, with whom he creates a darkly humorous version of his mother ("We laughed our tails off... Geneva turned Rock Hudson straight. Geneva pussy-whipped JFK and turned him monogamous..."), urges him to look into the case.

Ellroy contacts soon-to-retire Bill Stoner of the Unsolved section of LAPD; Stoner gets hooked on the case and hooks him on two other Unsolveds he's trying to finish up. (Ellroy attends the trial of one of these cases, held in the same courthouse as the Simpson trial. Nicole Simpson, Ellroy tells us, is the Black Dahlia of the '90s.) They interview people now in their 60s and 80s who were involved in the first investigation. They ask the widow of the other detective to look for her husband's old notebooks. They go on Unsolved Mysteries, where Ellroy meets the woman who plays his mother: "I called her Mom. She called me Son... I kidded her. I said, 'Don't go out chasing men while I'm gone this weekend.' She said, 'Buzz off, Jimmy — I need some action!'"

The journey ends in a town in Wisconsin, where Ellroy finds old photographs of his mother, kept by his dead aunt and provided by cousins he barely remembers.

That is what happens. That is sad and funny enough. But Ellroy's voice is what makes this book so well worth reading; that, and the structure, which is ingenious not for its own sake but for the sake of reflecting the truth that Ellroy knows and comes to know in the course of writing this memoir.

Memoirs can often seem self-indulgent. This one does not. It justifies its existence with every page. It makes me want to read his crime novels, and crime novels are not usually my thing. Ellroy here is fascinated not only by himself, but by the lives and sad ends of murder victims, and the grim and oddly hopeful men and women who investigate murders both new and old. He is preoccupied with memory and loss and the possibility of a sort of redemption through searching old dead ends and photographs. To read this book is to search with him and for him, and in the end to feel oddly satisfied by the unshocking conclusion.

— Rachel Carpenter