A DEATH IN THE WRITER'S FAMILY

By Paul Gray

After spending a weekend with his father in Los Angeles, a 10-year-old boy with divorced parents is returned to his mother's house in El Monte, a valley town a short bus ride to the east. Men in uniform tell him his mother was murdered early that morning. The son shows no emotion to the officers but breaks down on the bus ride back with his father: "I cried. I cranked tears out all the way to L.A. I hated her. I hated El Monte. Some unknown killer just bought me a brand-new beautiful life."

James Ellroy has told this story from his own childhood before, mainly to journalists attracted to his growing renown as a writer of dark, scarifyingly violent crime novels (The Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential). The anecdote enhanced his reputation, setting him off from his competitors. How many other toilers in the thriller trade could claim a mother murdered in a crime still unsolved? But My Dark Places (Knopf; 355 pages; $25) rehearses this unhappy history with a lot more than instant publicity in mind. Part memoir, part detective story, part meditation on the kind of men who kill and the women who die at their hands, Ellroy's new book displays a reality more chilling than fiction.

The narrative switches back and forth in time, from the Sunday morning, June 22, 1958, when Jean Ellroy's strangled body was discovered near a high school athletic field in El Monte, up to the recent past, when James, her only child, teams up with a retired member of the Los Angeles sheriff's department to investigate the old unsolved murder all over again. In between, Ellroy portrays the harrowing spell, unrecognized by him at the time, that his mother's fate cast over his adolescence and the sort of person and writer he would become.

Glad, he thinks, to be rid of his strict mother and living a largely undisciplined life with his feckless father, Ellroy grows addicted to crime stories: "Every book I read was a twisted homage to her. Every mystery solved was my love for her in ellipses." When his father dies, the still underage son goes into a long tailspin: alcohol, drugs, sleeping in public parks, petty burglaries, time in county jails. Miraculously, he rights himself and becomes a published writer. "I was hot to ascend," he says. "Ascension meant two things. I had to write a great crime novel. I had to attack the central story of my life."

He eventually wrote American Tabloid (1995), a crime novel that transcends the form in its imaginative breadth and depth. My Dark Places, which grew out of an article he wrote for GQ, is Ellroy's attempt to fulfill the second part of this bargain with himself, and it largely succeeds. Readers new to Ellroy may find his clipped, staccato prose disconcerting, particularly when it describes details of his mother's corpse and the procedures at her autopsy. He is also quite blunt about the sexual allure that memories of his mother--he calls her the Redhead--bring up for him: "I had to relive my incestuous fantasies and contextualize them and embellish them past the shame and the sense of boundary that always restricted them. I had to shack up with my mother."

The statement shocks, as it was no doubt meant to, but it is a metaphor for Ellroy's narrative and investigative methods. Mere sentiment deflects the truth. Love and reconciliation can come only through knowledge, however horrifying. His journey toward his mother goes beyond the personal into a world of pain and redemption.

--By Paul Gray